


Melissa McCall's Home for Battered Women and Children

by tokillthatmockingbird



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Other, and is the best mom ever, in which melissa mccall saves the world, mentions of domestic violence, perhaps other triggers will arise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-14 14:14:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 37,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1269469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokillthatmockingbird/pseuds/tokillthatmockingbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For as long as Scott McCall can remember, someone’s been living in his guest room. </p><p>For as long as Scott McCall can remember, his family has been growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking. </p><p>For as long as Scott McCall can remember, his mother has been a hero.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Part I._

 

For as long as Scott McCall can remember, someone’s been living in his guest room.

It’s never the same person, and they never stay very long. Sometimes, Scott can hear his mother shuffling them into the next room way past midnight, and when he wakes up in the morning, the room is empty, and his mom is putting new sheets on the bed. Sometimes, when he goes down to breakfast, there is another person at his table with a black eye or a fat lip, eating Cheerios with his parents. Sometimes they stick around for a week or so, taking up slight spaces and making little noise. They are a few that make lasting impressions, big personalities bullied into bruised capsules. There are a few who are as bitter and angry as they should be. There are a few who become friends.

Every once and a while, they get a letter or a picture. There’s never a return address, but they’re always smiling and less purple-d in the photos. Melissa keeps these photos on a corkboard in the kitchen. Every year, she takes them down, files them in boxes, pulls them out when she’s having a particularly bad day.

For as long as Scott McCall can remember, his family has been growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking.

For as long as Scott McCall can remember, his mother has been a hero.

 

He’s six years old when Melissa brings in her first survivor.

Her name is Irina. She’s Russian, blonde, and very, very pregnant.

From his bed, Scott hears soft weeping in the hallway, and by the direction of his Winnie the Pooh night light, rolls off his mattress and pads to the crack in his door.

“Thank you, Melissa, _thank you_ ,” Irina whispers. Her accent is thick enough that Scott can hear it but not so much that he doesn’t know what she says. He closes one eye to laser focus the other into the dark hall. He notices a thick white plaster wrapped around her arm and that one of her eyes is puffy and dark. He presses himself against the door, trying to hear more.

Melissa, with a flashlight, roots around the linen closet for sheets. “It’s the least I can do,” she says. She wears a set of wrinkled periwinkle scrubs, and her flyaway curls are stuffed into a bun at the nape of her neck. She looks like Mom is supposed to look, but there’s something different about her. She offers an arm to the woman and says, “Come on, the bedroom is this way. We’ll get you on the first bus out of here in the morning.”

Scott’s dad wakes him up in the morning and makes him breakfast. Melissa and Irina are mysteriously missing even though Tuesdays are Melissa’s mornings to take Scott to school, and she’s never missed one in literally ever. When Rafael pulls up to the curb, Scott doesn’t budge from his car seat. His father watches in the rear view mirror. “What’s up, buddy? You’re normally halfway to the building before I even stop the car.”

Scott loves his mom, his dad, Stiles, and kindergarten in that order. It takes a lot of worry about the first three to keep him from the last one.

“Who was the lady that came over last night?”

Rafael visibly hesitates, and Scott hangs onto the drops of silence, wide-eyed. “She’s one of Mom’s friends.”

“Then how come I never met her before?” Scott is innocently doubtful.

“Because you don’t know _everyone_ Mom and I know, _mijo_ ,” Rafael laughs, breathy and insincere. “Now go on. You’re going to miss the Pledge of Allegiance if you keep asking questions.” He scoops Scott’s Power Ranger backpack from the floor of the car and stretches out, offering it to be taken.

“Where did she go?” Scott asks.

Rafael droops, though the corners of his lips quirk at Scott’s persistence. “Where did who go?”

“Where did the lady go?”

“Mom took her to the bus stop. I don’t know where she was going.” He shakes the backpack, a signal for his son to take it. “We aren’t _supposed_ to know where she was going. Now, will you _please_ take your backpack and go inside? Otherwise you and me are _both_ gonna be in a lot of trouble when Mom finds out you were late.”

Scott unclips his belt and takes his backpack, planting a wet but distracted kiss on his father’s scruffy cheek before exiting the car and sprinting, more backpack than boy, up the front steps of the school.

Irina was the first survivor of Melissa McCall’s Home for Battered Women and Children, but she certainly was not the last.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mentions abuse, car accidents, psychiatric institutionalization, bed shackles, death
> 
> Real Life Warning: I don't know what a nurse's job is actually like... Also I apologize that the same chapter posted about 700,000 million times last night. Something was way up with my Internet.
> 
> Canon Warning: I don't remember the details of the day of Claudia's death very well. There was a car accident of some sort.

Two months pass, and the guest room remains empty. Dust gathers in its corners. It becomes, once again, a store unit-cum-office space for when Rafael’s paperworks crowds up the dining room table. Scott and Stiles call the room off-limits for Hide-And-Seek. Stiles claims that there just aren’t enough good hiding spots, but Scott is honest enough to admit that the room scares him. Shadows and spiderwebs and file boxes he can’t touch. It’s a museum of children’s nightmares. Even during the daylight, he tiptoes past the door.

Melissa tears down the curtains. While Scott and Stiles swap Pokémon cards over Scott’s mattress, she wrestles cobwebs out of the corners and bids away the dust and murky memories. With the boys’ help, she carts Rafael’s boxes into the living room, stacking them up high to the ceiling. Melissa stands back, admires her castle of paperwork. Rafael will hate it, but she doesn’t care.

 

Claudia only has a few weeks left. The best part of being a nurse was knowing how to help her when she needed it. The worst was knowing when there were no more ways to help. On her lunch break, Melissa chews on her tuna salad sandwich, props her feet against the guardrails of the bed, genuinely laughs when she can. Claudia is still Claudia under the drugs and the delusions. She is still Melissa’s best friend.

“I know what you did for Irina,” Claudia says serenely. Her hands are clamped in padded shackles, and they rest, idle, in her lap. She sits cross-legged, hunches forward to plait her dark hair into a braid. 

Melissa sets aside her sandwich, sets on the edge of the mattress. She assumes the hair-braiding, allowing Claudia to straighten her spine. “Honey, how do you know about Irina?” Melissa asks, conversationally, in spite of the rapid pounding of her heart. 

“Oh, Irina and I talked all the time,” Claudia says with a jangle of her cuffs as she waves her animated hands. “She and I were old pals.”

As far as Melissa is aware, Irina and Claudia never met. Claudia hasn’t left the psychiatric ward in two months. Irina never went further than the ER. Melissa doesn’t even think the girl came for pre-natal check-ups. Claudia might have made up her own Irina to interact with Melissa. It wouldn't be the first time.  


“She needed your help, and you gave it to her,” Claudia says. “You probably saved her life.”

Melissa feels hot tears shimmer over her eyes. She completes the braid with a squeeze of Claudia’s shoulders, murmurs a lame dismissal, and gathers up the remains of her lunch. She is nearly out the door when Claudia calls out, “I think you did the right thing, Melly!” Melissa pauses, eyes shut, heart clenching. “You always do the right thing.”

 

The room gets a new coat of paint. It’s lilac, the color Claudia wanted to be buried in. The boys help her roll out the tarps, eager to unbridle their energy into production. They even help coat the lower half of the walls in a choppy layer of purple.

When Rafael comes home, it’s to his case files stacked to the ceiling and laughter in the upstairs bedroom. He watches in the doorway, briefcase slack in his hand, as Melissa paints a stripe of color across Scott’s round cheek. Stiles’ peals of laughter are louder than they have been since the heaviness of his mother’s illness fell over his house.

“Daddy, you’re home!” Scott exclaims. “We painted!”

“I can see that,” Rafael says, placid, a soft grin turning the corners of his lips. “Mel, can I talk to you for a minute?” 

Melissa passes her paintbrush to Stiles who gives Scott the most devious grin in return that has them both roaring in laughter as Rafael pulls his wife aside. She smiles back at them. When she faces her husband, he tucks a paint-stained curl behind her ear. 

“Hon, what is all this?” he asks, gesturing to the plastic bins that crowd the narrow hall. He nudges the box labeled “winter sweaters” with his toe. 

“I’ll reorganize the attic so this will all fit, I promise,” she gushes. 

Rafael has always been centered around structure, rigid structure. He bends to the whims of his six year old son and to absolutely nothing else. The household should run on order and organization. His case files do not belong in the living room. But with Claudia in the hospital, he has had to drag up every ounce of patience from the core of his being. It helps him deal with the understandable moodiness of his wife and the ever-constant presence of the hyperactive Stiles Stilinski. 

If anyone could dismantle years of structure in just a few short visits, it was that boy.

“What about my files?” Rafael questions.

“I'll find a place for them, I will, I swear,” Melissa promises, laying her palms over his chest. When her brown eyes search for his, he cannot help but to smile down at her. He takes her hand, kisses the dry, lilac knuckles. “I just… I need to do this.”

“For Claudia?” he asks, staring back into the room where Stiles and Scott have collapsed in a heap of giggles, rolling on the plastic tarp.

“For me.”

 

Claudia dies on a Sunday, and even though Melissa feels like she could never get out of bed again, there’s a ten-car pile-up on the interstate, and there is work that needs to be done. Even though Melissa’s world has ground to a very harsh and painful stop, the real one keeps turning. She realizes it will continue to spin without her, so she either has to wake up or fall behind.

She allows herself one hour, tucked away into a janitorial closet in a pair of old jeans and one of Rafael’s faded Stanford sweatshirts. She cries off her make-up, cries away her voice, cries until her tear ducts are throbbing with heat and then cries some more. She cries up all the tears she refused to cry in front of Stiles and the Sheriff and her son, cries all the tears that Claudia wouldn’t on the day of her diagnosis. She cries and cries and cries. And then she stops.

When she closes the closet door behind her, her eyes are red, and her nose is raw, but she walks, clear-minded to the nurse’s station down the hall.

Behind the desk, Patty sees her friend among the chaos of the ER influx, and she spares a moment for sympathy. “Sweetheart, I just heard. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you, Patty,” Melissa says, grim but grateful, a hard lump swollen in her throat. She swallows. “Where do we need staff?”

“You can’t work today—!” 

“The hell I can’t. Where do we need staff? Have they gotten in all the survivors from the pile-up yet, or should I wait at the ER?” Melissa demands. She walks around the counter, clips her badge to her tear-stained sweatshirt. She looks over Patty’s shoulder, trying to make sense of the words on the computer screen, but her head is spinning. 

Patty looks unsure but knows better than to fight a grieving woman. “All the ER nurses are working with the crash victims. There’s some other patients that might need some assistance—”

“How many?”

“Five or six, last time I checked.”

Melissa squeezes through crowded halls and gurneys, holds open elevators and doors, and finally makes it to the ER. Papers litter the floor. Brown, watery footprints coat the floor. A lone janitor tries to make sense of the mess, surveys the room with a mop in his hand. Foot traffic has been so heavy that the automatic doors are sealed wide open. A cold draft fills the space. Two patients sit in seats, mute, ashamed.

“Mrs… Taylor?” A plump black woman, just a few years younger than Melissa, wobbles to her feet. She wrings her wrists, clutches her purse close to her chest. She holds a bloodied dish rag to her forehead, concealing half her face in a mess of crimson-soaked cloth. “Mrs. Taylor, if you’ll follow me, we’ll find you somewhere quiet and get that head of yours looked at.”

The woman follows obediently, silently. Even her footsteps don’t seem to make noise.

Melissa bustles her into one of the rooms, pulls the privacy curtain shut. 

“You chose a pretty busy day to trip down the stairs, Mrs. Taylor,” Melissa says lightly. Mrs. Taylor musters up a smile but remains tight-lipped. Melissa asks the questions that need to be asked, follows her duties to the letter. She’s turning to go find a doctor when she notices Mrs. Taylor’s shoulders shuddering with suppressed sobs. “Mrs. Taylor, are you all right?”  
“Nurse McCall, I didn’t fall down no flight of stairs,” Mrs. Taylor cries. “I got pushed.”

_ Claudia _ , Melissa thinks,  _ you sure got a funny way of telling me you made it to heaven all right . _

 

It’s well past three o’clock in the morning when Melissa and Mrs. Taylor make it home. Rafael wakes, staring up at the ceiling and listening at the quiet voices in the hall. He recognizes his wife and falters on the second voice. He rolls out of bed in time to see Melissa shut herself into the guest bedroom. He waits.

She emerges after five minutes of careful murmuring, bags under her eyes, clothes wrinkled and dirty. She jumps when she sees her husband in the doorway. “Rafe!” she exclaims, voice low. “You scared me.”

Rafael fixes his gaze on the closed bedroom door for a tense moment. All his muscles release as he softly looks at her. “Is tonight really the right time—?” he starts, but Melissa stops him.

“Tonight is  _ exactly _ the right time.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: description of violence, blood, cancer, death, abusive language
> 
> Canon Note: A Teen Wolf friend appears in this chapter! I took liberties on this person's past life.
> 
> Real Life: I also am unaware how to actually fix broken noses. My bad. I tried Googling it. It suggested plastic surgery? I don't know.

Scott is eight years old the first time he sees his mother get hit.

She’s driving carpool in a car that is so old that it’s more likely to break apart upon impact with a pedestrian than it is to cause that person any real harm. She has her hand buried in a McDonald’s bag and munches on French fries while Stiles rambles in the backseat about nothing in particular that involves Lydia Martin and her pretty red hair. She dusts salt off her fingers when she glares sternly into the rearview mirror. “Stiles Stilinski,” she reprimands. “I don’t care what the other boys in your class do. Don’t you ever pull Lydia Martin’s hair again, you hear me?” Stiles stares sheepishly into the reflection of her gaze. “If you want to talk to her so badly, you just talk to her. Like a person.”

It took her months to wiggle into the space that Claudia left. She could never fill it, but by now, she comfortably waded around inside it, not an intruder, but never the full figure. Sometimes she needed a pinch to remind her to channel Claudia’s patience, her gracefulness. Because Stiles Stilinski wasn’t just a handful— he was four handfuls— and since Claudia’s death, John Stilinski only had two hands to offer. Melissa had needed to step in. Rafael warned her about inserting herself where she didn’t belong, but John insisted. If Stiles respected anyone else as a parent figure, it was Melissa McCall.

“But what if she doesn’t wanna listen?” Stiles asks, red in the cheeks.

“Well, then, she’s missing out on a very cool dude,” Melissa says, “but it’s not her job to listen to you just because you want her to. So no more hair-pulling. You treat her like you treat Scott, or you don’t talk to her at all.” When she looks in the mirror, she sees Stiles reaching across the bench seat to put a spit-covered finger in Scott’s ear as he gazes out the window. He squeals when he feels the wetness. “On second thought, do not treat Lydia Martin like you treat Scott.”

Scott is both moaning and laughing, rubbing desperate hands at his invaded ear canal, when he stops and says, “Mom, what’s happening over there?” He stabs a dirty finger on his window. Melissa glances over.

The row of houses on their right is set up on a small, steep hill. A teenaged boy stumbles down the steps, holding his hands to his freely bleeding nose. A woman, dark rings around her eyes, a tennis racket in her hand, barrels out of the house like she’s been sling-shotted out of it, hurling down the stairs in a rage. At the bottom, she repeatedly strikes the young boy with her makeshift weapon, screaming words that come muffled through the car windows.

Scott’s mouth drops into a wide O of surprise when he hears the words, “You fuckin’ piece of shit!” as he presses his nose to the glass.

Stiles and Scott turn to Melissa with wide eyes. “Oh, she said some bad words,” Stiles admonishes.

The car jerks to a stop, and Melissa parks haphazardly at the curb. She pulls out her keys and in quick movements, places them in Scott’s hands. “I’m locking the car. Don't open it unless I ask you to, okay? Do not leave the car.” She glares particularly harshly at the two boys. “Do _not_ leave this car.”

The locks click, and Stiles unbuckles his belt, scrambling across the car and practically sitting on Scott in eagerness to watch the scene unfold out the window. Melissa wedges herself between the woman and the child, grabbing at the woman’s wrist and twisting the racket away. There’s a lot of screaming, the boy getting to his feet, adding words to the fire, and the blonde woman swings out her opposite hand and catches Melissa in the cheek with her fist.

“ _Mom_!” Scott cries, slotting himself so tightly against the door that he practically melds with it. He jiggles the handle with all his eight-year-old strength. Stiles snatches the keys out of Scott’s lap and fumbles with them until he aims the clicker at the door, and the locks snap open. He and Scott tumble out onto the grass in a heap. When the fresh air hits their faces and the volume of the screaming intensifies, they freeze up in fear.

“Mom, _stop_!” The boy, hoarse voice and sturdy despite the blood gushing from his nose, catches the tennis racket in its back swing and pulls. “Stop it! Are you fuckin’ _crazy_?”

With the weapon wrenched out of her hands, the woman backs away, nearly steaming in anger. Melissa, red-cheeked, stands, a stalwart, rigid wall between the woman and her son.

“You ungrateful little _shit_ ,” the woman hisses over Melissa’s shoulder. “After all I did for you, you ungrateful little shit!”

Melissa catches Scott and Stiles, petrified like statues, in her peripherals. She allows herself a quick glance over to them. “Stiles and Scott, _get back in the car_.” Her words snap them into action, and they scramble back inside, tripping over one another. “You get in the car too.” She doesn’t look back at the boy, but he seems to understand her.

He works his jaw to fight back but instead ducks his head and follows the young boys to the curb.

“If you get in that car, don’t you dare come back here, you hear me?” the woman bellows, spit flying. “I don’t want to see your face ever again, you worthless son of a bitch!”

The boy says nothing, just sadly ducks into the front seat of the car and stares out the windshield. Inside is quiet. Stiles and Scott share nervous glances but neither address the young man. He turns around. “You guys got some tissues?”

The woman barely has her mouth open to shout more profanities when Melissa snaps, “That’s _enough_!” For whatever reason, the woman listens, crosses her arms over her chest. She’s thin, bottle-blonde hair with brown, greasy roots. Her hip bones poke out sharply where her midriff is bared. Her eye-make up is dark but doesn’t hide her exhaustion, her frustration. She is disheveled, one bra strap hanging down her arm, acrylic nails snapped off in places and bloodied. Melissa notes a tattoo on her wrist— the name Penny, in basic black cursive, a rose wrapped around it.

“Where’re you takin’ my kid?” she asks, sniffing. The fury seems to be drained from her, and her eyes well with hot tears. “You gotta- you gotta give me my kid back. He’s all I got.”

“I can’t,” Melissa says, though her heart clenches. She looks back at the car, sees the boy engaging her own son, tries to imagine someone taking Scott away from her. Tries to imagine hurting Scott. It hardens her resolve. “You don’t _deserve_ a kid if you treat him like that.”

“Lady, you don’t understand—!” the woman fights back, desperate and angry again.

“I don’t _have_ to understand. There isn’t a thing in the world that excuses what I just saw you do to that poor boy,” Melissa snaps back. She crosses her arms over her chest, tries to tuck her outraged trembling away. “How _dare_ you? You’re his _mother_. He trusted you. You’re supposed to protect him.”

“Hey, who the fuck are you—?”

“Who the fuck am _I_?” Melissa interrupts. “I’m Melissa McCall. M-C-C-A-L-L. Go ahead and call the cops if you’d like. In fact, I’ll call them myself. I’ve got one of the deputies on my speed dial.” She digs her cell phone out of her pocket, flips it open. “What’s your name again, sweetheart? Gotta give a full report—”

“Fuck you, lady.”

“No, fuck _you_.” Melissa snaps her phone shut and shoves it with great deliberation back into her pocket. “If you come near that boy again, my husband— who is an agent with the FBI— will haul your ass off to jail.” It’s an empty threat, a lie, but Melissa knows this woman won’t know that.

She turns on her heel and strides back to the car, adrenaline and residual fear coursing through her. Her heart pounds as she gets in the front seat, slamming her door shut and locking the car tight. She wraps her fingers around the wheel, knuckles white. The chatter drops into silence.

“I thought,” she stares, voice shaking, “I told you boys to stay in the car.”

“Sorry, Mom.”  
“Sorry, Mrs. McCall.”

She turns to the boy. He stares at her with bright green eyes and expressive brows. His face is spotted with red welts and coloring bruises. He holds McDonald’s napkins to his nose, looks too big for his blood-crusted hooded sweatshirt. There are holes in the knees of his pants, and the legs float a few inches above his ankles. In clothes too small for his body, Melissa can see that he’s skinny, too skinny. He doesn’t look scared.

“What’s your name, sweetie?” she asks finally.

“Bobby,” he says, though his voice is hoarse and stuffy through his broken nose. “Bobby Parrish.”

“Let’s get you back to my house and cleaned up, all right?” she offers.

She’s putting the car in drive, and something seems to have roused Mrs. Parrish from her shocked paralysis. She rushes from the sidewalk up to the car and starts banging on the window by Bobby’s head.

“Bobby, baby, please,” she begs through a mess of mascara trails and running tears. “Baby, you know I didn’t mean it. You _know_ —”

Bobby stares straight ahead, and Melissa can see sadness in his clear eyes.

“Do you want to talk to her?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “No.”

Melissa drives away. Mrs. Parrish follows them to the sidewalk and tapers off, dropping from tears to wild screaming. It isn’t until they merge into traffic and are surrounded by a wall of other cars that Melissa finally asks, “Are you okay?”

Bobby nods, wincing as he pinches at his nose. “Just a bit surprised,” he admits. “I didn’t even know we _had_ a tennis racket.”

 

When Rafael gets home, it’s to Bobby at his kitchen counter, wearing one of his FBI training tee shirts. He has a mug of hot chocolate in one hand, blood-encrusted cotton balls up his nose, and he’s rearranging coins on the counter to teach Scott about money.

It’s been two years since their home became somewhat of a makeshift halfway house, so Rafael merely sets aside his briefcase and sheds his suit jacket. “ _Hola, mijo_ ,” he says. He’s learned to be careful around the people Melissa brings into the house, learned how to use slow movements and quiet voices and safe words. He’s learned to never make a large production of noticing their appearances. He’s frightened enough women and children and received enough pissed off glances from his wife that he’s been trained into a very helpful co-owner of their impromptu shelter.

“Dad! We got a new friend at our house,” Scott tells him with a painfully earnest smile. He barely registers his father planting a kiss on the top of his head. “He’s helping me with my math homework.”

“I can see that.”

Bobby gets to his feet and offers a hand. “I’m Bobby Parrish,” he says. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

Rafael is surprised by the firmness of the boy’s grip, the steadiness of his being. Most of the survivors who come through are, understandably, anxious around him, too shaky to address him in any interaction more than a wave. Bobby makes eye contact. Nothing about him shakes. “Nice to meet you, Bobby. Is my wife somewhere around here?”

“She went out to run a few errands,” Bobby says with a shrug of his slight shoulders. Rafael’s clothes swallow him in giant wrinkles of fabric. He notices his running shorts, rolled a number of times to lay against the boy’s hips.

The timer on the counter buzzes loudly, and Rafael ignores Bobby’s obvious flinch. Scott grabs the device and grins up at the two men. “The lasagna’s ready!”

It’s Rafael’s turn to flinch.

Scott notices. He starts laughing. “Don’t worry! It’s not Mom’s. Bobby and me made it.” He drops off his barstool and rushes to the oven, pressing his face against the glass. “It looks _so_ good, Dad.”

Bobby grabs the oven mitts from the counter and takes out a steaming pan of lasagna, setting it far back on the counter where Scott can’t reach. “Remember what your mom said, kiddo,” he says down to Scott. “Gotta wash up.” Scott obediently rushes for the bathroom down the hall, and Bobby gingerly pulls the cotton out of his nose, holding the puffs out until he can discard them safely in the trash.

“Well, he sure likes you,” Rafael says with a laugh, gesturing towards where Scott has disappeared.

Bobby shrugs, smiles at the linoleum. He seems more breakable with Scott’s absence. Rafael notices the shuffling distance he has put between them and ends up taking a step back himself. “All kids like new shiny things. He’ll get bored of me in a few days.”

“How long are you sticking around?” Rafael asks, going to the fridge and snatching out a beer. He cracks it open, takes a long guzzle, leans against the counter. Some stay a few hours, until a friend or family member can pick them up. Some stay weeks. One woman stayed two months while trying to get a hold of her family in Mexico City.

“Hopefully not long,” Bobby admits. “Melissa said she could get one of the deputies to go with me back to my house soon. See if I can figure something out with my mom. My dad’s stationed at Creech Air Force out in Nevada?” he mentions, and Rafael nods. He knows of the place, somewhere in the back of his mind. “I’m gonna try to get a hold of him. See if he can take me in, at least ‘til I can graduate.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen, sir. I’ll be seventeen in June.”

Rafael’s head spins. Melissa clearly wasn’t thinking they’d keep him until he graduated, right?

They fall into silence. Scott can be heard shuffling around the bathroom. There’s a quiet “ _uh oh_ ” that Rafael chooses to momentarily ignore. His mouth is drawn open in question when Melissa backs through the back door laden with various bags. “Scott! Bobby, I stopped at Target on the way home to get you something that doesn't look like a _trash bag_ on you— Rafe!” she exclaims when she turns and sees him. “Honey, you’re home! I see you met Bobby. God, that smells _heavenly_!” she exclaims, one long string of words as she bustles around the kitchen, depositing her armful of purchases.

“Melissa, what happened to your _face_?” Rafael nearly gasps, putting his body in front of hers to force her to a stop. He gently takes her chin in his hand and turns the bruised part of her face to the light, examining it with careful and livid eyes.

She waves him away. “It was nothing I couldn’t handle.” As if Melissa’s shoulders couldn’t carry the weight of the world with ease. “Now let’s talk about this dinner you made, Bobby, because you didn’t have to do that! I could have made the lasagna!”

Rafael manages a smile. "No, you couldn't."

 

Bobby stays for two weeks while his father ties up loose ends at Creech. Deputy Stilinski takes him back to his mother’s house to help explain the situation while Bobby gathers a few of his possessions. Instead, Bobby guides her to the couch himself and sits with her, arm around her shoulder while she bawls and apologizes. He promises to come back once she’s better, promises that he won’t let her be alone on Penny’s birthday. The evening ends with him pecking her on the cheek, her lighting a cigarette, and John corralling him back to the cruiser.

“Who’s Penny?” he asks with some trepidation.

“My little sister,” Bobby answers, voice heavy but not strained with tears. “She got leukemia when she was six. Died a few years ago.”

John nods in sympathy, starts back to the McCall’s house.

He doesn’t want to understand Mrs. Parrish, but he does.

 

“What is this for?” Bobby asks the McCall’s with a laugh.

There is a cake on the table, decorated in Scott’s untidy, eight-year-old scrawl. The lights are dim, candles are lit. It says “Good-buy”—Scott’s mistake— and there is a frowny face in the corner.

“Y’all didn’t have to do this,” he adds, quiet.

“We wanted to,” Melissa tells him. Rafael, with his hands on her shoulders, nods in agreement. Scott cannot stop wiggling, a goofy grin on his face.

“Blow ‘em out, blow ‘em out!” he exclaims, jumping in place.

Bobby does, and Rafael reaches to flip the lights on. They divvy up the dessert onto plates, eat silently. Bobby sets his slice down, barely picked at, the frowny face scraped through by his fork. “You know I ain’t gonna be gone forever,” he promises. Scott looks up, eyes wide and hopeful. “Penny’s birthday is in four months, and who knows? Maybe my mom’ll get help before that. I could be home before you know it.”

Melissa and Rafael exchange a look. They want to say, “Don’t count on that,” but they believe that a little bit of false hope is not always a bad thing. And from the look on his face, it’s obvious that Bobby doesn’t really believe it anyway. But Scott does, and that’s important.

When they load him into his father’s beat up Buick, Melissa slips a Post-It Note with her number into his hand. “Just in case you come back and want to catch up?” she suggests lightly, and although she doesn’t want to, her eyes fill with tears.

Breaking from her survivors is always difficult. She knows that they’re moving on to be safer and happy, to live better lives, but most of the time, they disappear without leaving an address— on purpose, no one wants to leave a paper trail for their abusers to find. But Melissa’s instantaneous connections are always more solid than they should be. Rafael warns her, every time a new person comes into their home.

“It’s not forever.”

“I don’t want it to be.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mentions of sexual abuse

Melissa teaches Scott the signs. He sits on the kitchen counter, swinging his feet and observing as Melissa bustles about the room. She dices vegetables nearly inherently, chopping without watching but never catching her fingers, never erring. It’s a Sunday night, just a few weeks until the school year begins again, and Scott wants to spend his last days of freedom following his mother around the house.

She doesn’t teach Scott because she wants to entrench him in her lifestyle choice. She teaches Scott because he asks. Repeatedly. At first, she finds the constant barrage of questions irritating, but upon reflection, she realizes the importance of his persistence. Scott, in his young age, is blindly obedient— a sheep following a leader. If Melissa walked off the edge of a cliff, he would follow without hesitation. Besides the time of his toddlerhood when his memory couldn’t hold onto the house rules for more than a few hours, Melissa cannot recall a time in which she had to ask Scott to do something— or not do something— twice.

It’s been two weeks, and every night, after Rafael kisses him goodnight and Melissa lags behind to tuck him in, he asks.

“How come we have so many people coming to live at our house?”

(Her old reply, “They need some help,” doesn’t cut it anymore.)

“How do you know they need help?”

“Mom, please.”

“Mom, _please_.”

Rafael warns Melissa that her bleeding heart is not Scott’s burden. At nine years old, Rafael finds it inappropriate to teach their son about the horrific abuse their house guests have suffered. Melissa agrees that the details should be spared— but everything?

 

“I just think it’s important for him to know what abuse looks like!” she says one night as they make the bed in the guest room.

It’s a typical night in a California June. The window is thrown open wide, a warm draft filling the room. Orange sunlight paints the walls. A woman named Sandy has just left with her cousin after escaping an emotionally cruel boyfriend, and the McCalls set out to reorder their lives for themselves. After christening the guest bedroom with new sheets, they will shut the door and allow the house to be only theirs for the first time in a month.

On the opposite side of the mattress, Rafael gives a look.

“I’m not saying we need to graphically explain what _molestation_ is, Rafe. But… like… when he starts dating! What if he’s in a relationship, and his partner starts abusing him? Shouldn’t we teach him the signs, so he knows when to get out?”

“Melissa, Scott is _nine_ , and he has an asthma attack when he tries to socialize with someone who isn’t Stiles Stilinski,” Rafael says, exasperated, as he tosses one side of the comforter to his wife. “I’m gonna be surprised if Stiles _isn’t_ his first date.”

“What if Stiles starts abusing him?” Melissa asks, hands on hips, defiant.

“ _Stiles Stilinski_ ? 50-pound beanpole Stiles Stilinski who once tackled a sixth grader for hitting Scott in the head with a dodgeball? You think that _Stiles_ is going to abuse our son?” Rafael asks, brow quirked.

Melissa worries her lip between her teeth. She doesn’t, but she wants to make a point.

Rafael shuffles around the bed in attempt to wrestle the pillow cases from his wife, takes her shoulders carefully, and looks her in the eye, smile turning his lips.

“Honey, you know that I will always support this… this do-gooder part of you,” he says, “but you can’t let it consume your life. Our nine-year-old kid does not need to know about rape and neglect. Can we at _least_ wait until he hits the double digits to drown him in this stuff?”

Melissa sighs. “You’re right. I know you’re right. It’s just…” She pinches the bridge of her nose, sits on the edge of the mattress. Rafael’s expression melts to one of concern. “I feel like I see it everywhere now, you know? These women tell me these stories about their partners, and now I can’t go to the grocery store without wondering… Is that mom just having a bad day, or is she verbally abusing her kid? Is the woman who comes into the ER a victim, or did she _really_ fall down the stairs?”

She buries her face in her hands, rubs calloused fingers on her temples. Her shoulders sag with exhaustion, and Rafael squats in front of her.

“You need a break,” he tells her firmly but kindly. “You’ve been doing this for three years non-stop, and you’re tired. I understand you want to help,” he adds when she lifts her head and snaps her jaw open in retort, “but you can’t help anyone if you’re stressed. If you don’t get some distance from this, I think it’s gonna end up hurting you. And it’s not worth it. You are not the only person in this world who can help them.”

“No, but sometimes I’m the only person that does.”

“And why are you the only one who should shoulder that responsibility?” Rafael demands. He straightens, smooths the wrinkles in his tee shirt. “Melissa, that’s it, I’m sorry. I’m laying down the law. I don’t want any boarders for the rest of the summer. I’m serious. You’re tired. _I’m_ tired. And Scott deserves a summer to have us to himself, don’t you think?”

Melissa agrees to stop hosting women and children for the summer, but for a moment, she doesn’t stop thinking about them.

 

Rafael takes John and a few of the other deputies on their annual summer fishing trip, and Melissa finds that without him to constantly remind her why she’s been dodging Scott’s rampant questioning, it’s harder and harder to ignore him. That’s why, when she starts making pico de gallo with Scott bouncing around her heels, she just heaves him up on the counter and puts her hands on either side of his hips, tilting her head to make stern eye contact.

“If I tell you, will you stop asking me?”

Scott nods vehemently, eagerly.

“If I tell you, do you pinky promise not to tell your dad that I told you?” She doesn’t like asking her son to lie to his father, but it’s not a lie if he just doesn’t say anything, right? ( _Lie of omission_ , a nasty voice sneers in the back of her head, but she pushes it down.)

Scott hesitates, but he nods again and offers his pinky. Melissa wraps her finger around his, hangs her head between her shoulders, sighs, and teaches.

She starts with the hard stuff first, what abuse is, that there are different kinds, that it can happen to anyone, that anyone can do it. Scott finds the natural pauses to ask further questions, careful ones, and Melissa wonders how much he’s aged since she started bringing people into their home. She answers as honestly as she can, and when she can’t answer honestly, she tells him that. Scott is mature enough now to take that answer with some grace, even if he doesn't look happy about it.

She thinks it will be harder to explain the emotional signs, the way that victims feel more self-conscious, more self-hatred, less connected to their peers and their parents. But Scott is more sensitive than he is observant. He asks more questions about bruises and flinching than about anything else.

“But don’t just go up to people and ask about it,” Melissa warns, brandishes her knife in his direction. “If you think something seems _up_ , you tell me, and I’ll figure out what to do.”

“What if I see something bad happen? Can I stop it?” Scott asks eagerly, reaching into a pile of jalepeños and snapping one into his mouth.

“ _No_ ,” Melissa demands. She stops preparing the food and puts her hands on her hips. “Scott Ernesto McCall, you do _not_ , under any circumstances, try to intervene.”

“You do!” Scott exclaims.

Hesitating, Melissa returns coolly to her pico. “That’s because I’m an adult.”

“Bobby did it that one time,” Scott reminds her.

“Well, how about this? When you’re bigger than me, you can try to help, okay? Otherwise, you have to come talk to me first about what you see.”

Scott doesn’t seem satisfied, but he accepts it. And because of his promise, when Rafael comes home later that night, reeking of fish and swampiness and asking about what they did that day, Scott answers, “A whole lotta nothing, Dad.”

 

Melissa reads a magazine in the carpool line, sunglasses perched in her hair, music low. The California sun is bright and high. School has been in session just a few short weeks, though it feels like months, and it’s date night. A Wednesday— because Melissa works on Thursday nights and Rafael has been called as an expert for trial— and by the gas pedals, Melissa wiggles her cherry red toenails. They’re still the kind of wet that smudges in the sheets, protected by the ridiculous foam sandals that Scott and Stiles laugh at. She tilts her head back, smiles into the warmth of the sun through the windshield. She jumps when she hears a tap on her window.

Scott sits outside, nervous smile, clenching his backpack straps.

Confused, she rolls down the window. “Whatcha doin’, kiddo?” she asks. Scott toes the ground. Melissa feels her stern look slip over her features.

“Mom, I know you said I shouldn’t do this,” Scott starts, and her heart sinks in worry, “but Maggie and her sister need some help.”

Melissa glances over Scott’s head and sees two girls, one willowy, freckled teenager, and her equally sun-spotted little sister, holding hands beside the bus stop. She meets eyes with the older sister over the road and pushes open the car door.

“Scott, get in the car.”

“Are you mad at me?” Scott asks, guilty.

“I’m not mad. Get in the car. I’ll be right back.”

Scott clambers in and cracks the window, watching as his mother awkwardly flops across the street in her foam sandals. She shares a brief conversation with the oldest sister, and Scott can see the girl wiping at her nose and eyes. Melissa makes a gesture towards the car and scoops up Maggie’s backpack.

Wordlessly, the three ladies pile into the car. Melissa locks the door and with no discussion, starts towards home.

 

Emily and Maggie are ushered into the house, given a plate of cookies and some space. Melissa takes Scott to his bedroom and sits him down on the edge of his mattress. She sits beside him, serious though slightly proud.

“Scott, how did you know that Maggie and Emily needed our help?” she asks.

Scott looks at the patterns on the bed sheets. “Because you told me.”

Melissa sighs. “What made you think that they needed our help?” she asks more clearly.

“Maggie told me that she saw her dad…” His voice drops low, cheeks burning red. He leans forward and whispers, gesturing between his legs for clarity, “touch Emily’s private square.”

Scott was raised with intimate knowledge of his right to privacy and control of his own body. Melissa had long ago sat him down to explain that he had no obligation to kiss or hug or touch anyone he didn’t want to—not that he was fond of turning down physical affection for his loved ones— and he had every right to refuse those things as well. So scared of Scott’s apparent inability to tell anyone “no” in fear of disappointment, she taught him the power of the word, taught him to use it when he wanted to, where his own body was concerned. After she started opening her home to those who needed it, Melissa had become so jaded with the entirety of the human race that she had coached her son through good and bad touches for weeks, reminding him that there were places on his body that no one got to touch, even if they asked.

As a nurse, she had offered to give this talk up at the school, but the administration thought it to be a topic that was “inappropriate” for children Scott’s age.

“Are you mad at me, Mom?” Scott asks again, fidgeting.

Melissa rises and sits beside him, pressing a kiss to his temple. “I’m not mad at you, I promise. I’m proud of you for telling me when you thought something was wrong.” She looks down at him, and he meets her eyes. “That was really brave of you.”

Scott shrugs. “I’m just doing what you woulda done.”

 

When Rafael comes home from work, he has a bouquet of flowers and dinner reservations ticking ever-closer. Scott is no where to be found, and when he enters the living room, it’s to Melissa clutching a teenaged girl to her chest while the fifteen-year-old bawls. Melissa makes eye contact with him over the girl’s blonde head and mouths, “I’m sorry.”

Rafael nods, like it doesn't matter even though it does, biting back a sigh of disappointment. “Next week,” he mouths back

 

Next week, Melissa gets a call from Mr. Kinney, threatening her life if she didn’t stop telling the cops about what he did. Rafael puts a baseball bat in the front hall and sleeps with his gun in his bedside table. Melissa puts locks on the guest bedroom door.

Next week, Mrs. Kinney flies home early from a business trip and gathers up her daughters while they all cry. She promises that she will never let it happen again, apologizes that she had been so blind before, loves them.

Next week, Scott invites Maggie over to play every day after school because he thinks he is protecting her in the same way his mother had.

Next week, there is no date night. There isn’t even a single mention of it. Rafael’s roses wilt in a vase on the kitchen counter, and he throws them away without Melissa even noticing they were there. She falls asleep before he gets home from work, two nights in a row, and before they know it, next week is last week, and it’s date night again.

 

When Rafael comes home on date night, it’s to Mrs. Kinney on his couch, crying over a cup of coffee. Melissa doesn’t bother to shoot him a sympathetic look or to promise Next Week. Next week isn’t coming. Rafael knows that. As long as Melissa McCall lived and breathed, her heart was there for the survivors that she kept in her home. It was so full of women and children who needed her help that it seemed she hardly had room for her husband.

While Melissa tried to save others from bad relationships, she hardly noticed her own turning sour. No one did, until it ended.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: transphobia, abandonment

Melissa has to learn to prioritize. Her home becomes a revolving door of sad, battered people. Some she picks up (sometimes literally) off the streets. Others climb in through the grapevine. Somehow, she’s become known in an underground community as a woman who tirelessly protects and loves those who need it most.

But she is also a mother, a wife, and a nurse— in that order— and balancing has never been her forte.

But she’s learning. The days that she has time for herself are confusing and disorienting, and she checks her calendar and her planner and her clock trying to figure out what she isn’t doing that she probably should be. Like ghost promises she has clinging to her shoulders.

She never forgets to be a mother. Scott gets tucked into bed, no matter how tired she is. She makes a lunch in the morning and signs her notes with hearts. When the third grade puts on a Thanksgiving Day play and Scott plays the part of the silent Indian #3, she and Rafael sit in the front row with a video camera. He looks green in the face the whole time, but they still cheer for him when he takes his bow.

There is a lull— there has to be a lull, or she would lose her mind— and she uses it to catch up on her sleep, to read a novel she hasn’t finished, to _breathe_. But mostly she uses it to be with her son. And Rafael tries not to be selfish, doesn’t want to admit that he wants to take some of Scott’s time away from Melissa for himself, but he _does_. Because he’s human and can only handle so much rejection before he gets hurt or gets mad.

And Rafael has never been a man prone to getting emotional, so of course, he gets mad.

The first night he spends with Felicity Martin is a drunken mistake. She’s newly divorced and sipping appletinis by herself, and he’s got six beers in him because Melissa has taken Scott to the hospital for his asthma again, and while Rafael knows he should be there, it’s starting to feel so _routine_ — her leaving him for their son— that he just can’t bring himself to care. Melissa would call if something was seriously wrong?

_Or would she?_ is the last bitter thought in his head before he sauntered to the newly-single woman’s table.

After the first night with her, he realizes that he’s not so angry after he leaves. It’s harder to look his family in the eyes, but it makes his chest lighter, makes his fists stop clenching. He doesn’t know when he started being so selfish, but he allows it, tells himself that he’s been so giving for so long that he’s owed something just for himself. It makes him feel better, just not for long.

The second night with Felicity Martin is absolutely on purpose. Because the good feeling has faded and left him with nothing but a guilty heart. Because the sex is so mind-blowingly amazing that it makes him forget the guilt—until it doesn’t.

The third night with Felicity Martin ends with her finding his wedding ring in his coat pocket, throwing a vodka cranberry in his face, and storming out the door. Rafael realizes he needs to tell Melissa before Felicity tells the entirety of Beacon Hills. What fills his chest is more embarrassment than regret. He doesn’t like not loving Melissa, but he finds that loving her is harder. He knows there are scores of people in this town that love her now, and they can take his place.

He just forgets that one of them is his own son.

 

It takes two weeks for him to find the courage and the time. Their schedules barely match up anymore— neither of them truly make an effort to make them match up anymore— but when he wrestles her from Scott’s room with a mug of tea and a very friendly, though serious, “Melissa, can I talk to you alone for a second?”, she comes with a smile on her face.

It hurts because she does still love him. She just forgot to show him somewhere along the way. His heart clenches.

She folds onto the couch, takes the drink, looks so content, unknowing. It is the closest to hating himself that Rafael has felt throughout the whole debacle.

“What’d you want to talk about, honey?” she asks, patting the cushions next to him. But without letting him content, she sighs into her tea. “Things have just been so busy lately. I feel like we haven’t talked in a long time.”

Rafael wonders vaguely if this is God’s way of punishing him for adultery, making Melissa suddenly sentimental and attentive the moment Rafael thinks he’s doing the right thing by leaving her.

“Maybe we should take next weekend, go up to Portland to see my parents,” she muses, more to herself than to him. “I know my mom can be insufferable, but maybe we could go to Giamatto’s. Where we first met. Throwback to the good old days.” Her smile is so bright and calm that it practically transforms the room, and Rafael feels his seething self-hatred warp self-protectively into rabid anger. (It is safer, much safer, for him to be angry than guilty.)

His mouth is drawn open in reply when they hear a knock on the door.

“Were you expecting someone?” Melissa asks, brows drawn.

Dry mouthed, Rafael shakes his head.

Melissa goes to answer the door. When it swings open wide, a young black man stands outside, thin, bony, angular. He looks up, nervously shuffles. “Are you Melissa McCall?” he asks, and Rafael narrows his eyes at the pitch of the voice, positioning himself for a better view of the doorway.

“I am.”

“I heard you, uh, I heard you take people in when they’ve got no where else to go,” he says.

“Come on in, sweetheart.” Melissa ushers the teenager into the room and shuts the door behind him. She immediately shuffles him under the hall light, taking a mental inventory of anything she sees. There is a swell in his lip, puffiness under his left eye, but he is mostly unscathed. “Do you need some ice?”

“No, no, I’m fine. This is old,” he says, gesturing easily to his face. “Just some kids at school.”

Melissa’s brow raises. “ _School_? Did you tell a teacher about it? Did you go to the administration?”

He shakes his head. “No point.” And Melissa knows better than anyone that it is not her place to question why or why not, not her place to suggest that it is up to the abused to make the abuse go away. Sometimes, most of the time, it just doesn’t work that way. “Do you…” The boy gathers all of the courage he has nestled in his chest. “Do you think I could stay here? Just for a night or so? My girlfriend is gonna try and convince her parents to let me stay until I can get a job…”

“Sure, of course, stay as long as you like…” Her voice drifts off as she realizes she hasn’t picked up a name.

“Caden.” Caden sounds unsure of the word on his lips. “Caden Boyd.” Melissa doesn’t realize that she looks suspicious until Caden shrugs his thin shoulders. “I’m just… getting used to it. I’ve been Catherine for so long that…” The strength in his voice fades until he stares pointedly at the ground without finishing his sentence.

“That’s fine, Caden,” Melissa says, ease on her tongue. “We’ll call you whatever you’d like. Why don’t we get your stuff into the upstairs bedroom? I’ll have my son go put some new sheets on the bed, and you can grab a snack, go wash up, whatever you want.”

When she turns back around, Rafael is no longer in the living room.

 

Melissa knows Scott is happy to help, so she allows him to make the bed on his own. At twelve years old, he’s capable and ready and eager to please. With Rafael seeming to have disappeared out the back door with the appearance of their new visitor, she needs Scott to take over while she tries to locate her husband. His runaway act has her concerned.

She hangs outside the doorway while Scott and Caden dance around the mattress, tucking sheets into corners and shoving pillows into their cases. They’re abysmally slow and awkward, leaving wrinkles and having to turn the sheet a number of times around the bed until they finally face it in the right direction. Melissa clutches her cell phone in her hand, hoping her three messages and nine phone calls will be enough to alert her husband to her worry. She listens.

“Aren’t you Vernon’s sister?” Scott asks conversationally. Melissa almost jumps in to correct him.

“I’m Vernon’s brother,” Caden corrects, kindly and carefully, practiced, like he’s done it a million times before. “My name used to be Catherine, but I’m Caden now.”

“Did you not want to be a sister?” Scott asks because while Melissa has exposed him to different sexualities, she never thought to explain what it meant to be transgendered, never thought that it would come up. She feels stupid now, unprepared.

“Something like that,” Caden says with a shrug of his shoulders. “I don’t think I was supposed to be a girl when I was born. I think God made a mistake.” Scott seems a little uncomfortable with the idea, having grown up with devout grandparents who taught him that God was the only being in the universe that was perfect. But he doesn’t correct Caden to be polite, and Melissa is grateful for his manners. “Which is fine. God’s a little busy. Doesn’t have time to worry about every little detail, but He also gave us free will, which means I get to decide if I want to be a girl or not. And I decided I didn’t want to be.”

Because Scott is familiar with the concept of choice, he nods, understanding. “So did you pick your new name?”

Caden nods, tucking in the last corner of the sheets. He sits on the edge of the mattress and busies himself with the laces on his combat boots. Scott stands back and watches, listens.

“It means ‘fighter’,” Caden says, “and I thought it was fitting. Since I’ve been fighting to become Caden for so long.”

“Why were you fighting?” Scott’s go-to has always been ‘how come’, ‘why’.  Any lack of learning isn’t because there is a lack of desire. He is curious and wondrous, in such a childlike way. Melissa wants him to hold onto it forever.

“Because my mom and dad didn’t want me to be a boy,” Caden answers. “They wanted me to stay a girl because it’s easier. For them. But I wasn’t happy as a girl, and I wanted to be happy, so I did what I wanted, and they said that they wanted me to be a girl or not be in their house at all.” He fingers the threads of his fraying laces, straightens up. “So I left.”

Scott sits beside Caden on the mattress and contemplates for a while. Caden ruffles around in his backpack, takes out a water bottle, a toothbrush, organizes his small smattering of belongings onto the bedside table. Scott finally says, “I think that’s really brave of you. ‘Cause you stood up for what you believed in, even though everyone else said you were wrong.” Caden looks over, eyes bright with relief. A pause. “Do you miss Vernon?”

Caden nods. “And our little sister, Alicia. I’m gonna miss them. But I’ll see them at school. I’ll find a way to see them. I’m just… not gonna live with them.”  
“You’re gonna live with us, right?” Scott asks, hopeful.

“Sure, I guess,” Caden says, “Just… not for too long.”

“Well, you can stay as long as you want,” Scott promises. “Even if someone else comes and needs the guest room, we can share my room. There’s lot of space on the floor, and I’ve got a sleeping bag.”

Caden smiles gratefully and reaches out. He hesitates and then decides to pull Scott into a one-armed hug, ruffling his mop of dark hair. “Thank you.” And it’s for more than just a place to stay. It’s for validation and comfort and understanding, which he hasn’t had in so, so long.

 

Caden’s girlfriend Emiko comes by the house three days later and gathers Caden up on the porch. They hug for a long time. They even cry a little bit. And together they lug all of Caden’s things to the back of Emiko’s mom’s car. Melissa doesn’t ask any questions, but Scott has a million of them. He bites them back, sensing the inappropriateness of his timing, but he’s wiggling, itching to _know_.

Scott walks down the front path with Emiko and Caden, and Melissa watches from the porch, hugging her bathrobe around her in the early morning chill. Scott, in his Superman pajama pants, shivers while they stand beside the car, waiting for the right words. “I hope you can get your surgery,” Scott finally says. Emiko smiles and ducks into the car, sensing a need for some privacy.

“I hope so too,” Caden admits. A silence passes between them. “Hey, can you make me a promise?”

Scott nods vehemently.

“Can you promise to watch after Vernon for me?” Caden asks with hesitation on his tongue. “He doesn’t think he needs anyone else, but I think if you could just try to be his friend, that would help a whole lot.” Scott promises, and Caden wraps him in a tight hug, ruffling his hair one more time. “See you around, Scott.”

 

Two days later, Scott wakes up to the sound of his mother’s voice, shrill and angry and distant. He groggily rouses himself to attention, looks for the source of her words. When he looks out the window, he sees his father with his bags piled beside his car. His mother stands in the dew drops, hugging herself in the cold. Rafael silently picks up his things, case by case, and deposits them into his trunk.

Scott gallops down the stairs to watch from the front window.

“Rafael, _please_ , can we talk about this?” Melissa begs, even though she’s never begged before, never had to beg. She chokes on her tears, which slip freely over pink cheeks. “ _Please_. Tell me what I did. Tell me what I can do.”

“You can’t do anything, Melissa. It’s just over,” Rafael says stonily, laying his suits carefully across the back seat of his car. He reaches deep inside, picks up a small baseball mitt and thumbs the loose strings. He crossed to his wife, holding it out. “This is Scott’s.”

“Just tell me what you want, Rafael,” Melissa demands tearfully. “Tell me… tell what I can do to fix this. Think about Scott. Think about… he’s twelve years old! He needs his father!”

Rafael’s expression is blank, uncaring with a flicker of something behind his eyes. Melissa sniffs, wiping at her nose with the sleeve of her bathrobe. The morning is gray and chilly, barely time for the sun to rise and warm the earth. Her feet are covered in flecks of mowed grass. She wears a pair of Rafael’s boxers and a flowery tee shirt Scott bought her for Mother’s Day.

Rafael tries again to hand her the mitt, and she shoves it away. “No! I don’t… I don’t want that.” Wordlessly, he holds it out again. She shoves it away. Scott watches them dance like this for a few pushes and pulls until Melissa whips the mitt onto the cement walkway with a heavy thud. “Please don’t do this!” she demands though she sounds more desperate than angry. “Please. We can… we can work it out. We can go into therapy. I can stop opening the guest room—!”

Rafael laughs a cruel, short laugh and shakes his head. “Melissa, you’ll never stop opening that guest room to other people. Ever. You and I both know that.”

“But if it means saving our marriage—”

“You’ll choose them. You always do.”

The empty sound of the neighborhood is a humming, uncomfortable white noise. Scott can still hear the quiet sound of crickets in the grass, not ready for sunrise. Melissa sniffs and sobs, and Rafael doesn’t make a sound. He is heavy with exhaustion when he wriggles his wedding ring off his finger and holds it out.

“I don’t need this.”

Melissa shakes her head. “ _Don’t_.”

“Melissa, take the ring.”

“Rafael, please just listen to me!”

“Melissa, _take the ring_!”

“ _No_!”

Scott’s heart races as he watches his father’s arm dart out and latch onto his mother’s wrist. She starts to twist and tug away, suddenly bawling, as he tries to pry her clenched fingers open from its fist. Scott takes the baseball bat from beside the door, and he runs out into the yard, bare feet and too-short pajama pants.

At twelve, he’s still shorter than his mother, but he’s growing, thin bands of muscle growing on his skinny arms. He is half his father’s size and because of so many hospitalizations, so underweight, but it doesn’t stop him from raising his voice, raising his weapon.

“ _Let go of her, Dad_.”

Rafael freezes. Melissa, taking his hesitation, yanks herself free and turns to her son. “Scott, it’s okay. It’s okay. Go back inside.” She wipes tears from her cheeks as she says it, trying to corral him back to the porch with gentle, guiding hands. He stands his ground, jaw set, defiant. Melissa pauses. “Honey, why do you have my bat?”

“Scott, go back inside. Your mother and I need to talk,” Rafael says sternly.

Scott looks doubtful. He just squares himself into the grass, grips a little tighter on the bat. Rafael’s brow knits in anger, and he wheels on Melissa with such vehemence that it hits her like a slap to the face.

“Look at this!” he exclaims, gesturing wildly to Scott. Neighbors are peeking through their curtains to watch the ruckus next door. “Look what you did! You’ve made our son so paranoid that he thinks I’m a _threat_ to you!”

“You grabbed her.”

“I was just giving her back her ring, Scott. That’s all I was doing.”

“She didn’t want it.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Scott, sweetie, go back inside. Take the bat with you. Go on.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said. Go back inside now.”

When Scott has secured the door behind him, he notices that he’s trembling and drops the bat to the floor. He rushes to the window, pushing aside the curtains, presses his face to the glass. With blood rushing through his ears, Scott can barely make out what they’re saying. There’s a lot of gesturing back to him in the window, a lot of crying on Melissa’s part. Scott watches his dad duck into his car, Melissa mid-sentence, and speed out of the driveway, tires squealing.

Melissa just stares in the spot he last occupied, numb, cold. Scott comes back outside, tentative, intrepid, and wraps his mother in a hug. She sniffs and squeezes him so tightly that it hurts, pressing a hard kiss to the top of his head.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Scott says. “Sometimes, if you’re not happy, you’ve got to leave.”

  
Scott didn’t cry for a few days, not until the full weight of the situation laid heavy on him. The guest bedroom was empty and so was the spot beside his mother. He stared up, blurry-eyed, at the ceiling, waiting for rest to come. His father was unhappy. Scott couldn’t make him happy. Melissa couldn’t make him happy. They were not enough to keep him there, and so Scott pledged, early on, that he wouldn’t wish for him back. That he would be happy without Rafael, just like Rafael was happy without him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: violence, mentions of physical abuse
> 
> Canon note: I have been sticking as closely to canon as possible throughout this story (at least, I hope I have), but I decided that the story is going to have a major canon divergence which is going to be very obvious in the next chapter: No werewolves! I didn't think it was a necessary addition to the plot, and it would have made things much more complicated for me, if I'm perfectly honest.
> 
> Other note: I don't know. If there is something you all would like to see, I would love to hear about it. I have a definite idea of where the story is going to go, but I always like to play with other peoples' ideas to see what I can come up with!
> 
> ALSO! Thank you so much for the comments so far! You all have been so supportive and wonderful, and I appreciate it so much!

Scott is fourteen when someone tries to break into his house.

A woman named Naomi and her twins Clara and Joey are sharing the guest room.

“It’s a tight squeeze,” Melissa had apologized.

“It’s perfect.”

She’s so entirely grateful that Melissa is helping her that she wakes up early and leaves a hot breakfast on the counter. She retreats into her room all day, quiets her children, and spends every moment of the McCalls’ absences cleaning the house until it shines. She has a thick ring of bruises around her neck that clenches painfully when she swallows. Two of her fingers are trapped in a plaster cast that her children have scribbled across. Despite the pain and despite her situation, she is a bright addition to the household.

Her children—Double and Trouble as Scott’s started calling them— are equally radiant, all smiles and laughter and joyous wonder. They explore every inch of the house with Scott on their tails, pulling on things they shouldn’t, tumbling over their own feet, gleeful and unaware.

Scott enjoys brother-ing the twins and spends any time not spent with Stiles or at his desk doing homework corralling them into the backyard, being a human rocket ship or a dirty pirate or whatever figment of imagination they need him to be. When the kids trip and fall and scrape knees and elbows, Scott is attentive and careful, scooping them up and hugging them close and pressing kisses and bandages on any area that hurts.

“He’s a natural,” Naomi tells Melissa one day over coffee. They sit in the window seat together, feet touching in the space between them. Scott and the twins tumble through the dying grass in their winter coats, squealing with laughter, breaths caught in the wind.

“I know,” Melissa says with a proud smile turning her lips.

“It’s so nice, having someone around to help with the kids,” Naomi admits with a sigh, staring wistfully out the window. “Kyle spent all day at work, and then he’d be so bone tired that by the time he finally got out of the shower, he’d have no energy to help me. And don’t get me wrong. I love them with all my heart, but… it’s not easy to raise two kids on your own.”

Melissa nods knowingly.

“Scott turned out great,” Naomi says. “I don’t know how you did it.”  
“Oh, he did it himself,” Melissa replies with a wave of his hand. “I changed his diapers and fed him, but all that—” She gestures out the window. “I didn’t teach him that.”

 

Naomi becomes more of a friend than a house guest. She and Melissa laugh over breakfast, tag-team loads of laundry and dishes. They run a tight and happy ship together, when Naomi’s injuries don’t hinder her performance, and once the kids have passed out in bed, they sometimes sneak downstairs to share a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.

When Naomi signs the restraining order and slides it over to Melissa for her witness signature, Melissa reaches across the counter and gives the woman a high five. They bubble with laughter because being happy in the face of something bad is sometimes the strongest and only thing you can do. “I think that this deserves some margaritas, don’t you?” Melissa asks seriously.

“I think that _everything_ deserves some margaritas,” Naomi laughs, “but this especially.”

They leave Scott in charge of the twins, which causes three-year-old squeals to rise up in joy. They order a pizza and leave some money, and before the sun goes down, the women head to a local joint for margaritas and sketchy bar peanuts and relaxation.

The kids are in the middle of an intense game of Candyland when there is a heavy knock on the door. Scott smiles. “Pizza time!” he exclaims, and the kids’ faces light up brighter than a Christmas tree.

Scott snatches the check off the coffee table and has his hand on the doorknob when he hears a dark, hoarse voice on the other side of the door. “Naomi!” A series of coughs, phlegmatic and scratchy, a smoker’s. “Naomi, come on, I know you’re in there!”

_Bang, bang, bang._

“Naomi, open the door and let me talk to you!”

Scott’s muscles freeze in fright. The twins hear the banging and gravitate into the hall, staring wide-eyed from Scott to the entryway. The longer he waits, the louder the banging becomes. Clara starts crying.

“I can hear you in there, Naomi! I can hear the kids! Let me in!”

The door shakes in its frame.

“Fucking _let me in the house, bitch_!”

Scott pulls himself into reality and shoves illness and fear deep into the pit of his stomach. His knees are jello as he turns, stumbles, scooping up one twin in each arm and awkwardly sprinting up the stairs with them on his hips. He stops in his mother’s room. “Grab that phone, Joey,” he tells the toddler because his own hands are too full. “Go on, Joey. It’s okay. Grab the phone.”

After calmly coaxing him into it, Joey cradles the phone to his chest and slots himself against Scott’s side. Scott rushes down the hall and into the bathroom, the only room in the house with a proper lock. The twins, receptive to his urgency and fear, start wailing simultaneously, snot-faced and red-eyed. Scott squats onto the floor, back to the door, cuddles them into his chest, shushes them. He hears a massive commotion downstairs, the sound of splintering wood and shattering glass, the roar of an angry and hurt man.

“Shhh,” Scott whispers. “Joey, Clara, shh, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

“ _Naomi_!”

“It’s going to be fine,” Scott promises himself more than the children, rocking them slightly. “I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.” He wiggles the phone out from under Joey and thinks immediate of his mother. Trembling fingers attempt to dial, and he stops himself. “No, no,” he mutters, out loud. The twins whimper in his ears, faces buried into his shoulders. “No, Mr. Stilinski. I need…”

He dials.

 

When Melissa gets home, it’s with the alcohol from the margarita burned out of her system by worry and fear. Naomi is pale and unsteady beside her. They meet John inside. The three children are sitting side-by-side on the couch, the twins tucked into Scott’s side, all wrapped up tightly in shock blankets, looking rattled but unscathed.

Naomi immediately runs and gathers her children up in her arms. Melissa starts towards Scott, but he stands behind the children, sharp, rigid lines. He watches each paramedic and CSI as they pass through his house. Any movement towards the little family is greeted by his stern glare. Melissa can see his hands shaking.

“Is he all right?” she asks John. “Is Scott all right? Did he tell you anything?”

“He’s scared to death,” John admits— though you wouldn’t know it by looking at Scott. “But he wasn’t hurt. Neither were the twins. Apparently Kyle Palermo found out that Naomi was living here and wanted something from her.”

Melissa nods, color drained from her face, numb because feeling everything at once was impossible.

John places a hand on her shoulder.

“Melissa, Scott was amazing,” John tells her, and there’s even a hint of pride in his own voice. “He didn’t think he could run through the backyard with the twins in his arms without getting caught, so he went and locked them all in the bathroom with a phone. Called me as soon as he could.”

Over John’s shoulder, Naomi embraces Scott in a tight hug, bawling hard into his shoulder with repeated gratitude. He pats her on the back warmly, sincerely.

“When I got here, Scott had hidden the girl in the linen closet and the boy under the sink, and he was standing at the door with a plunger,” John continued. It would have been a funny sight in different circumstances. Melissa feels her heart well up with warmth and feelings she couldn’t name. “He’s a good kid, Mel. He’s a really good kid.”

 

Because Kyle Palermo is still at large and because the front door to the McCall’s house had been rendered entirely useless by the break in, Melissa, Scott, and the three Palermos pack up bags of belongings and pile into the Stilinski’s house.

Scott takes the twins to Stiles’ bedroom, where he’s been pacing and wringing his wrists since his dad bolted from the house yelling about "staying put" and "Scott’s house". He hides his worry by enthusiastically questioning Scott about the break in and his heroics which earns a very pointed “ _Stiles_ , inappropriate,” by John.

By the time it is well past midnight, Scott and Stiles have wrestled the twins into bed in the big guestroom. John brings Naomi back from meeting a sketch artist at the police station, and her adrenaline rush has left her so dead tired that she immediately snuggles into bed with her children.

Melissa kisses Scott good-night, promises that she’s nearby if he needs her, but she knows he won’t. He and Stiles are laying side-by-side in Stiles’ bed when she walks past the cracked door. “Were you scared?” Stiles asks, and while he’s never managed volume control, his voice is low enough that Melissa has to strain to listen.

“Yeah,” Scott says honestly. “I thought he was gonna kill me or something.”

“When my dad said he was going to your house, I was scared that you finally lit it on fire trying to make chicken nuggets.” It has been a very real possibility since Melissa taught Scott the art of nuking his meals. “I’m just glad you’re all right.”

“Yeah, me too.” Melissa can hear the panic on the edge of her son’s voice, the tears that he bites at the end of the sentence.

“Well, listen, buddy, my dad’s not gonna let that asshole come back and get you,” Stiles promises, trying out his fourteen-year-old words when he thinks no one is listening. “He’s gonna find him and throw his ass in jail, and you’ll go down in history as the Dude Who Saved Some Three-Year-Olds.”

Melissa smiles softly. She loves the easy honesty between the boys, the simple way they communicate. There is no fear in the relationship except _for_ each other. They trust each other with their emotions, with their secrets. Scott is inherently sensitive and emotional, and Melissa is grateful that he found a counterpart in Stiles Stilinski— a boy who is perhaps more sarcasm than blood but also deeply loyal.

“Dude, think about how popular you’re gonna be at school when everyone finds out,” Stiles says. “Chicks dig superheros.”

Scott laughs, and Melissa suddenly feels intrusive. She almost turns into the Sheriff’s bedroom— which he has offered her since their house is lacking in beds— but instead pads down the stairs. She feels so at home with the Stilinskis that she forgets, for a moment, why Scott’s baby pictures are not lining the stairway.

She pauses at one photo, runs gentle fingertips across the glass. “Well, Claudia,” she says, “I hope you’re happy. I did what you wanted.” She laughs. “You always got me in so much trouble. I don’t know why I always listened to you.” She lapses into silence, hangs her head. “I miss you.”

 

In the living room, John is sprawled on the couch in a pair of old sweats and a threadbare tee-shirt. His gun rests on the coffee table, facing away from him. A throw blanket covers his chest but doesn’t quite reach his ankles. He faces the door.

When Melissa puts pressure on a creaking board, his eyes snap open. “Oh, hey, Melissa,” he says conversationally, voice sleep-heavy. He sits upright. “Going to bed?”

“Yeah, I… I just thought I’d say… thank you,” she says. She hugs her arms around her chest, hands lost in the sleeves of Scott’s Beacon Hills High sweatshirt. “For everything.”

“I’m just doing my job.”

“You know, I don’t remember ‘giving victims a place to sleep’ as a prerequisite of being a cop,” Melissa says.

“That’s why you’re a nurse, and I’m the sheriff,” John plays back.

“I took a criminal law class!” she exclaims, mockingly offended. John just laughs but lets it fall into the floorboards. She took the class because her roommate had told her that Rafael was in it, and since Melissa had needed an elective… well, what a perfect way to double task. Find a boyfriend. Complete degree. She clears her throat. “But, really, John, you didn’t have to do all this.”

“I wanted to make sure you were safe,” he admits. “It didn’t feel right just leaving you to get a motel room when we’ve got so much space here anyway.”

“Apparently not enough space because you’re down here,” Melissa points out, brows raised. She leans against the doorway, casual smile on her lips. Her relationship with John has always been as easy as the one that their children shared. There were different barriers— his distance and alcoholic intake after Claudia’s death, her obstinacy and distrust of members of the male species after Rafael left. But she never felt as though they had drifted or couldn’t count on one another before. That was more than she could say for about anyone in her life; even her relationship with Rafael wasn’t made of such strong things.

“I’ve slept on hospital chairs. The couch is like sleeping on a cloud compared to that,” John reminds her. A silence passes between them. They hear a burst of laughter from above them, the laughter being smothered by something— probably a pillow or a sweaty hand. “Melissa, I know it’s not my place, but…” John rubs the back of his neck. “This… this taking people in. It’s amazing what you’ve done. It really is. But it’s so unsafe—”

“Yeah, well, imagine how unsafe it is for those people who don’t have a place to stay,” Melissa interrupts because she had the argument with Rafael more times than she could count. “Either they stay with their abusive husbands or parents or end up on the streets.”

“I understand,” John tells her. As sheriff, he has seen his fair share of domestic violence. Has seen the hollow look in some of the women’s eyes. Seen the twitchy fearfulness of the children. Has seen corpses zipped into body bags because no one acted in time. “I just worry about you and Scott, all by yourselves. Do you even own a gun?”

Melissa shrugs. “A bat.”

John doesn’t look impressed. “Melissa, don’t take this the wrong way, but… wasn’t tonight a bit of a wake-up call for you?” John asks, _begs_ , because he had been so scared of having to add “Scott McCall” to his long list of names of people he couldn’t save. “You saw what happened to Naomi. Can you imagine what would have happened to Scott if Kyle Palermo had found them in the bathroom?”

Melissa’s heart sinks, face burns in embarrassment. She crosses the room, sits on the couch beside John without looking at him.

Taking in the people who needed her was good. No one disputed how brave and noble and giving it was to offer her home and care and protection to others. But she hadn’t done it because of what other people would say about it. She had done it because she wanted to _help_ people. Had she been so focused on this do-good attitude that she had lost sight of what was really important? She was helping the strangers who needed her, but was she helping her son by putting him at risk?

“What if it was you?” John continues. “What if you were the one at home and had to protect yourself against him? Melissa, you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t stop him. And then what? What would happen to Scott if you ended up in the hospital? Or worse?”

Melissa had a plan for that. Of course Melissa had a plan for her son. But that didn’t mean she wanted to use it any time soon.

“What you’ve done is so incredible. You’ve given a lot of these people a second chance at _life_. You’ve been so open-minded and so open-hearted, but I think there comes a time when you can’t be helpful anymore,” John says. As a man who works tirelessly long hours as the town sheriff, he shouldn’t throw stones at her glass shelter, but he does for now. “If you’re putting Scott and yourself in danger, is it worth it?”

He stops because he’s said all he can and all he wants to, because he senses her understanding and desperate need for thought. They sit side-by-side, thighs touching, elbows knocking when they shift. Finally, Melissa leans over and presses a kiss to his temple. “Thank you, John.”

 

Melissa closes the door to the McCall’s Home for Battered Women and Children after Naomi leaves. It takes her months to beat back the reflex of washing a spare set of sheets, of stocking up on first aid kits and soap for the spare bathroom. She learns to keep a thick pile of business cards in her car, in her wallet, on her person. A referral to a shelter that can help.

It’s two years until she finally breaks her resolve and opens her doors for the final time.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mentions of abuse, hospitalization, panic attacks
> 
> Chapter Notes: This is the first chapter of Part II: The Isaac Lahey portion of the story. This is where I'm probably going to take some great liberties with canon, and again no werewolves! Hope you all like it!

_Part II._

 

When Scott is eight years old, he spends two weeks in the hospital. For a whole week, it's like she never leaves the hospital. She calls Rafael in San Francisco crying each night after Scott drifts off with his small chest raggedly expanding and contracting. Rafael cries once— twice maybe— too. Leaving this conference could mean losing his job, and with the bill being racked up in the hospital— well... “Tell Scott I love him.”

An hour after hospital cafeteria dinner #4 of the week, some unknown source triggers an acute asthma attack while Scott and Stiles are playing card games in Scott’s hospital bed, and Melissa hauls Stiles away while on-duty nurses and doctors arrest the gasping and wheezing Scott.

The best part of being a nurse is knowing how to help Scott when he needs it. The worst is knowing when there are no more ways to help.

Stiles is wordless, pale. Melissa shudders as nurses scramble for medications, as Scott’s lips turned blue. When they insert a ventilator, Melissa chokes on her tears and clutches Stiles in a bone-crushing, life-affirming hug. He clings back, his face a mess of snot and tears, trembling. “I—can’t—breathe,” he hiccupps into her shirt.

She suddenly remembers Claudia, Stiles being the only one in the room when she choked on her last breaths.

With Scott sedated and under careful eyes of the staff, Melissa corrals Stiles into the hall and plants him into a seat outside Scott’s room. Other nurses hear the commotion, poke their heads out of their patients’ rooms to see. The McCall suite is a nightmare of chaos— asthma attacks, panic attacks, bawling mothers and children.

It takes ten minutes to talk Stiles down from his panic, and when he can breathe steady on his own, he squares himself at the door.

“Are you sure you wanna go back in right now, Stiles?” Melissa asks carefully.

Stiles nods, determination set in his expression. “Gotta show him— it’s not that hard to breathe right.” He ducks back inside, and Melissa, shaking nerves out of her limbs, starts on a slow walk around the halls.

The hospital looks so different than it usually does. Work is routine, everyday exposure. She had gotten used to the pattern on the tiles and the paper on the walls. As the mother of a patient, she has a new perspective, a darker light, and she hates how she suddenly understands why her patients abhor this place. She picks up her head, figures she’s somewhere near the pediatrics ward, and realizes that she’s doesn't know where she is.

Lost. That’s all she really felt lately anyway.

“Excuse me.” The voice barely breaks into her consciousness. “ _Excuse me_. Nurse?”

Melissa snaps her head up, a natural reply. She wheels around with unbalanced motions, the outcome of days without sleep. A young man stands behind her, tall, broad. He has a shock of dark hair, expressive brows, the shadow of a mature beard on his cheeks. He can’t be older than sixteen, but the worry that lines his face is that of someone much older, someone who has seen a lot more than any sixteen year old should.

“I need your help,” he admits nervously.

Melissa almost points out that she isn’t on-duty, but when she concentrates on something other than the exhaustive heaviness of her limbs, she realizes she is still wearing her scrubs from her last shift. When she looks up, she sees deep concern in the boy’s bright hazel eyes. “What can I do for you, sweetie?” Her voice is not its usual friendly nurse, but she doesn’t expect anything more than exhausted and terrified mother to come out. This is somewhere comfortably in-between. Mother and nurse and just a slight hint of scared-out-of-her-mind.

“My friend. He’s… this is the fourth time I’ve brought him to the ER this year,” the boy says, wringing his wrists.

Melissa feels that familiar tug around her navel, the clench around her heart. The pull towards the tragedy, the hammering pulse under her skin that calls her to help.

_Scott’s in the hospital,_ she thinks, as if she needs to remind herself. _You cannot take in a boarde_ r.

“If the injuries are suspicious and frequent enough, trained nurses will flag his file,” Melissa soothes. “So your friend—”

“No, you don’t _get_ it!” There is a flare of anger that lights in his chest. His body tenses with his reeling temper. Melissa takes a step back, suddenly acute through her exhaustion. “He won’t go to the same hospital twice. I drove him to _New Castle_ two months ago for stitches because he wouldn’t go anywhere else!”

Melissa’s brow knits. New Castle is a town outside of Beacon Hills, a thirty minute drive on a good day. There is no hospital there, nothing but an UrgentCare and a direct phone line to Beacon Hills Memorial. 

“What’s your name, honey?” she asks calmly.

His chest heaves with the effort to restrain his fear-fueled temper. He looks so desperate when he meets her gaze that Melissa feels her guard melt. He’s not dangerous— just a kid scared for his friend who cannot properly channel his concern into anything but rage. It reminds Melissa vaguely of her husband. “Derek.” He swallows. “Derek Hale.”

“Okay, Derek, I'm Melissa. Why don’t you and me go get something to eat and talk about it?” She approaches, places a hand between his shoulder blades and guides him down the hallway. He nods, and she can see that his hands are trembling.

Melissa grabs four pudding cups and a bottle of water. She hands Derek one of the snacks and stores the rest in her purse—Scott and Stiles with thank her for her thieving ways later. She folds her hands over the tabletop, careful to stay out of Derek’s space but close enough to remind him that she is there to listen.

“Has your friend…?”

“Camden.”

“Has Camden told you where he’s getting his injuries?” Melissa asks.

Derek shakes his head. “The first two times he said he fell down the stairs, but the last two times, he hasn’t even bothered to make up an excuse.”

“Who else knows?” Melissa questions. “Have you told your own parents? Any teachers? Is there someone your friend trusts—?”

“He trusts me.” Derek turns his spoon in his pudding cup but makes no effort to eat it. “He had a lot of friends, but he stopped keeping up with them, I guess? Said his dad didn’t want him out during swim season.” Derek doesn’t sound convinced, and neither is Melissa. She knows enough about abuse to know the pattern easily— charm, isolate, introduce, abuse, kill. “So now… now he’s just got me.”

“How do _you_ think he’s getting injured?” Melissa wants to make sure they’re on the same page before she insinuates anything about this boy’s home life. Derek bites his lip and glancing up at her beneath dark lashes. He hesitates. “Just be honest. I’m not going to get defensive.”

“I think… God, it sounds so _stupid_ , but I think it’s his _dad_.” Derek buries his face in his hands.

“That doesn’t sound stupid at all,” Melissa soothes him. “In fact, with what you’ve told me, it sounds entirely plausible.”

“But you don’t know Mr. Lahey,” Derek disagrees. “He and Cam… I mean, they’re close. Mr. Lahey was Cam’s swim coach until, well… until last year, after Mrs. Lahey died. Then he got fired— or _let go_ or whatever the school called it.”

The more Melissa hears, the more her chest feels like it’s filling with ice and lead. She shivers, doesn’t want to know how to put the pieces together.

_Scott. In the hospital._

“I don’t want to betray his trust,” Derek says, fiddling with the watch around his wrist. “I just don’t want him to end up really hurt when I could have done something about it.“

“You’re doing the right thing,” Melissa reassures him.

“I don’t think Camden’s gonna think the same way,” Derek grumbles, rubbing a hand through his hair.

“No, he probably won’t for a while,” Melissa says, honest but gentle. “But he’ll be safe.”

_Hospital. Your son is in the hospital._

“I’ll tell you what, Derek. I’ll flag his file myself. I’ll ask the attending ER doctor to ask about it, see if Camden feels comfortable opening up to a medical professional about it. It’s a lot easier when he’s removed from his father, so he can’t get hurt—”

Derek suddenly loses all his color, has an expression like he’s been punched in the gut. “Isaac.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Cam’s kid brother, Isaac. He’s still at home with Mr. Lahey. Cam’s not gonna say a damn thing if he thinks Isaac’s gonna get hurt—  _God damn it,_ ” Derek hisses between his teeth. He fists his fingers tightly in his hair, hangs his head. “How could I be so _stupid_?”

“You’re not stupid at all,” Melissa demands. “You’re a kid, Derek. You don’t know how to handle this yet. You shouldn’t have to handle it.” Derek just continues hanging his head, shaking it. She wrestles a napkin out of a stubborn dispenser and takes a pen out of her shirt pocket. “Okay, Derek, how about this? You see if Camden is finished in the ER and then bring him to this room. I have a lot of experience with this kind of thing, and I can help him.”

She scribbles Scott’s room number, and for good measure, her cell phone number, onto the napkin. She slides it across the table, and Derek takes it gingerly, reading it over like a sacred text. (To him, it was akin to reading the Holy Bible. This is what would save his best friend, he was convinced. He’d worship this napkin every night if it did that.)

“Thank you.” Derek scoots back his chair with a noisy scrape and heads towards the ER.

“Hey!” Melissa calls after him. “Are you gonna eat this pudding cup?”

 

Two hours later, Melissa is folded into a chair beside Scott’s bed, one hand holding his, the other pressing a magazine to her knees. Ignoring the ventilator. Keeping a close eye on the numbers on the machines. Stiles sits in a chair on the opposite side of the bed, face planted into the sheets at Scott’s feet, drooling in his sleep. Melissa draped her coat over his bony shoulders. His angle is so awkward she wonders how he could possibly doze off, but she remembers it’s muscle memory, that he’s done it too many times before.

She tries to refocus on her magazine.

Outside the door, she hears muttered conversation, heated.

“—not going in there. Are you _nuts?_ ”

“She just wants to help—!”

“ _Help?_ She’s gonna cart my dad off to jail, and then what? Isaac and I go into the foster care system and never see each other again?”

Melissa is on her feet, inching towards the door. She ignores the nagging voice in her ear that tells her that these teenagers deserve their privacy and listens intently.

“How do you even know that’s gonna happen? Maybe Melissa can—”

“I’m not risking it, Derek!” The voice belongs to who Melissa assumes is Camden. It’s hoarse, a croak and a rasp, like he’s speaking out of choked vocal chords. It’s a new voice but a familiar sound. Melissa has heard it before. “I’ve got, what? Two more years until I’m eighteen? Then I can just take Ize, and we don’t have to worry—”

“You’re fucking _delusional_ if you think your dad is gonna let you take Isaac.” Derek’s temper flares, but neither of their voices raise above heated murmurs. “And you’re delusional if you think you’re going to be able to raise him on your own! You don’t have any money! That’s not a real _plan,_ Cam. At least just listen to what this lady has to say!”

“You know what, forget about it, man. Thanks for the ride. I’m taking the bus home.”

“Cam.” Pause. “Cam, come on.” Pause. “Camden, _wait._ ”

Derek’s footsteps thunder away, but they return, dragging, dejected. Melissa jumps when she hears gentle raps on the door, and she swings it open wide, perhaps suspiciously soon. Derek stands before her, bright eyes suddenly duller, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“He won’t listen to me,” the boy croaks. “He won’t… He’s such an idiot.”

Melissa squeezes out the door, shuts it behind her. “He’s just scared to death, Derek. He’ll come around. You’ve just gotta be there for him.” Derek doesn’t look sure. “Keep my number,” she suggests. “Talk to your parents. Figure out what to do. Give me a call if you need my help. I’ve got a guest room—” _Your son is in the hospital,_ the nagging voice tells her, but she waves it off. “I’ve got a guest room if he and his brother need somewhere to stay for a little while.”

  
It’s the first time she’s ever heard the name Lahey, and eight years later, she still remembers.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mentions of abuse
> 
> AN: There is a spoiler for the movie Fight Club in here, just in case people don't want the movie ruined...
> 
> And at last! Our first glimpse of Isaac Lahey!

Their lives change, in an almost neutral way, when Melissa shuts the doors. Both their hearts ache with the thought of the ones who need them— even at fourteen, Scott is aware that his life is a privileged one because Melissa made it as such. Having the survivors living in the room next door is a gift—friendships and memories made, lonely nights and questions filled. An appreciation for the life he had and the parents who gave it to him. Even after Rafael walked out, Scott recognized that he had, at least, once been loved by the man.

But it is safer for them, quieter in the sense that their energy is spent for the first time in a long time on themselves. Scott and Melissa are textbook extroverted people who thrive off the energy of those around them. They spent so many years giving of themselves, even in the smallest ways, that they never allowed for a moment of peace. It is well deserved but sort of empty. Neither of them _want_ peace if it means closing their home.

But Melissa does it because she thinks Scott needs to know he is safe in his own home. Scott never questions it because he knows his mother will always do what she thinks is best for him, even if it sucks.

 

Eight years is a long time to hold onto a memory, so Melissa kind of doesn’t.

She doesn’t forget Derek Hale and her napkin and her promise. Not entirely. It floats in the back of her mind, a pinch every once and a while when Lahey’s name comes up on the lacrosse team roster, a nagging reminder when she reads a story in the newspaper about the Hale residence burning to the ground with only three survivors. It’s _there_ _,_ but mostly it’s not. Eight years is a long time.

 

When Isaac is ten, there’s an announcement in the Beacon Hills High School newsletter about a Camden Lahey’s commitment to the United States Marine Corps, about him being the first in twenty years to go to the branch, about some militaristic mumbo jumbo that Melissa doesn’t understand, mostly because her brain fizzled out at Camden Lahey. There is something about that name.

 

On Isaac’s twelfth birthday, he ends up in the ER needing stitches in his head. His father looms above him like a tower of negativity, complaining that head wounds always bleed more and that this was a ridiculous waste of time. Rafael had walked out on Melissa three days before, and she is so wrapped up in her own misery that she fails, for once, to recognize someone else’s.

 

Isaac gets hired at his first job at fourteen, and like his brother once did, he works at the grocery store, bagging food and not talking. Melissa always chooses his line, oblivious to how his identity so deeply ties with hers, because she hates how _sad_ he looks down there, all by himself. All the other employees seem to chat across aisles, laughing, smiling when they scan the food. Isaac stares at the ground when he asks if you want paper or plastic. He doesn’t acknowledge Melissa’s “thank you!” as she exits the store.

 

She doesn’t think a lot about Isaac Lahey because, really, no one does. He’s made his existence such that he barely does exist, just a name on the lips of a pale, thin boy, going wherever he’s told. Beneath the knots in his muscles and the bruises on his skin is a child that Melissa McCall could love, if only she picked her head up from the magazine rack at the check-out line more often. There’s a mind under that curly head of hair worth rescuing, even if it was just handing him a pamphlet for nearby shelters, information on federally recognized Safe Places. She hasn’t taken a boarder in since Naomi Palermo because if there is one thing Melissa McCall is good for, it’s the promises she makes her son.

 

Scott is quiet at dinner. Stiles babbles through a mouthful of green beans, of carrots, of Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pie. His animated talking is punctuated by wild arm movements and expressive faces, and Melissa is so desperate for his energy that she finds herself, for once, hanging off his every word. Her plate is empty before she notices Scott’s abbreviated silences. He looks up to laugh at the right times, to roll his eyes, but he always returns to pushing a pea around his plate with his fork.

It’s Stiles who finally realizes how many stories he’s told, when he looks at the clock and sees the time. “Well, I’ve got a dad to hide curly fries from. See you tomorrow,” he tells them rather unceremoniously, especially for him, before he ducks out the back door and drives off in his brand-new-old blue Jeep that he and his father rescued from an impound lot.

Scott clears the table by muscle memory, mechanically washing the dishes and stowing them while Melissa sweeps off the floor the stray bits of vegetables that fell prey to Stiles’ wild movements.

When Scott grumbles a dismissal and presses a kiss against her temple— he’s gotten so tall that he bends instead of standing on his tiptoes— she calls after him. “Scott, is there something you want to talk about?”

And when he turns around, he almost looks relieved. Something pricks Melissa’s heart. Did he think there was something he couldn’t come to her outrightly about? Since when have they kept secrets? She recognizes that her son is sixteen, but she is perhaps arrogant enough to think that she’s raised a pretty exceptional sixteen year old. She doesn’t want to hear about how many socks he’s _gone through_ _,_ so to speak, but she didn’t think there were any important barriers between them.

“There’s this guy…” Scott starts and avoids her gaze by jumping onto the counter and watching her scrub the table clean. He swings his feet slightly, heels bumping the cabinets in a steady rhythm. He likes things like that— beats, constants. Scott likes to be able to predict what is coming next. He finds comfort in normalcy, repetition. It’s why being friends with Stiles Stilinski can be so damn exhausting sometimes. It reminds Melissa that Scott is his father's son, even though he outrightly doesn't want to be. “He’s on the lacrosse team. He’s… he sits on the bench with Stiles and me.”

Melissa sets aside her rag.

“I don’t know. He doesn’t talk a lot or anything, but he seems like a pretty cool guy.” Scott shrugs. His scale for judging other people is People Who Have, Like, 365 Consecutive Bad Days to Stiles Stilinski Best Friend Extraordinaire. Scott has never been the best judge of character, and part of Melissa loves that part of him. The other part fears that it is blind naivety that will end up hurting him in the end. “He’s kinda funny, you know, if you can get him to say anything.”

Melissa nods, leans against the counter caddy-corner to him. She thinks she can unravel the course of this conversation faster than Scott can get the words out, but she remembers her patience and waits for him to feel comfortable.

“We… we were getting out of practice, and I had forgotten my inhaler in my locker, so I went back and saw him changing,” Scott starts, and he sounds guilty, upset with himself. “I hung back a few times, you know, just to make sure that I…” He stops altogether, swallowing on his admittance.

Melissa sighs. “Sweetheart, it is totally natural what you’re feeling,” she says with a smile turning the corners of her lips. “You know I’m going to love you either way.”

Scott’s face melts from one of regret to one of utter confusion. “What?”

“I don’t care if you like boys or girls or _both_! You know that—”

“Wait, no,” Scott interrupts.

“I just want you to be happy, and if you think this Isaac kid is going to make you happy—”

“Wait, Mom, I’m not—”

“Then I want you to like whoever makes you happy,” Melissa finishes, sincerely.

“But I’m not gay,” Scott says. “I… I’m not _attracted_ to him.” He stops. “Well, he’s really good-looking, in an objective kind of way, but that’s not the point. I wasn’t hanging back to check him out. He’s got these bruises all over him, really bad ones. They aren’t just lacrosse injuries. They’re everywhere. I think he stays behind to change because he doesn’t want anyone to see them.”

Melissa listens, contemplates. “You’re not gay?” She almost sounds disappointed.

Now Scott sounds confused. “I don’t think so?”

“Could you have told me that before I gave you my speech?” she asks. “I’ve been practicing it since you were _born_ _._ ”

“You thought I was gay when I was born?”

“I thought there was a _possibility_ you could be gay when you were born.”

“Mom, we’re off topic here,” Scott says with a shake of his head. “I really think Isaac needs our help.”

Melissa bites her lip, rubs her knuckles nervously. “Honey, we aren’t doing that anymore—”

“His brother just went MIA in combat,” Scott tells her, brow knit in concern. “I think he’s really lost, and he could really use some help.”

It’s not that Melissa doesn’t want to help. Melissa wants to help, but she feels like she can’t. She feels like she’s putting her son through her own cycle of abuse— of allowing these people in, watching them walk out, dealing with the consequences of abusers showing up at their home. It’s not fair to her child to put other children’s needs above his.

“Scott, we _can’t_ _._ ”

“But, Mom, I think he’s getting really hurt!” Scott exclaims.

“Honey, I know, but it’s…” She has to swallow around a hard lump in her throat. “It’s none of our business.”

Scott looks taken back, like Melissa has just told him that she was going to die. She had so openly abhorred that statement throughout her life, equated it with lack of generosity, lack of humanity. Melissa hates to judge other people on their decisions, but she suddenly finds a nagging dislike of those who tell her that they didn’t intervene because “it wasn’t their business”.

Melissa McCall made other people’s well-being her business, and Scott had learned by example.

“I’m going to bed. It’s been a long day.” She races upstairs with tears in her eyes, shuts her door for the night. She hates herself for it, for how emotional she is, for crying with the bathroom sink running so Scott wouldn’t hear. Her mother always said not to waste her tears, but Melissa didn’t think this was a waste. She had lost a large part of herself, saying that to her son, sticking by this new lifestyle. She doesn’t like what she’s become, and she prays to God that Scott won’t follow suit.

 

Stiles helps Scott break into the copy room at school and print out over a hundred pamphlets for the nearby shelter for battered women and children. It’s called the Rose Shelter, and it sits only a few blocks from the hospital, close enough to school and far enough away from home.

On Monday, he tapes one of the flyers onto Isaac’s locker. He watches from across the hall as Isaac panics, looks over his shoulder, and crumples the pamphlet in his bare hands.

On Tuesday, Scott folds up the paper and shoves it into the slots on the locker. When Isaac finds them, crinkled, on top of his books, he tosses it directly into the trash can.

On Wednesday, he looks slightly paranoid as he approaches his locker. When he finds three of the pamphlets, he slams the locker shut without gathering his books and dashes away.

On Thursday, Scott spends the morning in the nurses office, complaining of a tight chest and a wheeze, so Stiles takes it upon himself to pick the lock and pile in no fewer than seventy-five pamphlets. When Isaac opens his locker and watches them spill onto the floor, a congealed mass of multi-colored paper, he almost looks like he’s going to cry— and not in the good way. He sprints off, nearly slipping on one of the flyers, and he doesn’t return to his locker for the rest of the day.

There is a lacrosse game on Friday, and because the bench needs to be warmed, Stiles and Scott focus more on that than harassing the quiet boy from the team. They’re both anxious, despite knowing that their cleats would never grind the soil. Scott spends most of the day with his heart hammering beneath his sternum. Stiles channels all his nervous energy into acting nonchalant, but it mostly makes him seem like he’s jacked up on cocaine rather than cool, calm, and collected.

“Isaac isn’t here yet,” Scott notes.

“Do you want me to get his number for you?” Stiles asks, rolling his lacrosse stick between his palms. “Because I’ll do it.”

“Why does everyone think I’m gay lately?”

“I mean, I’ve always been pulling for you and Danny to get together. I personally think you’d be cute—” Stiles starts, but he bites off his words when he gets a pointedly exasperated look from his best friend. He clears his throat. “Probably because you’ve been following Isaac around like a puppy. You haven’t been like this since… well, since two weeks ago when you gave that Allison girl a pen. Man, your rebound rate is off-the-charts.”

“Shut up, Stiles,” Scott grumbles, though he’s laughing. His heart is inclined to fast attachments, what can he say? He spent his teenaged years so far fighting broken hearts and crushes with an array of people who walked in and out of his life. He is emotionally intelligent enough to know love when he feels it, but it doesn’t mean any connections he feels are invalid if they aren’t _love_ _._ “I’m just… I didn’t see him at school today. Did you? _Don’t_ _,_ ” he adds quickly when he sees the quip on his friend’s tongue.

Stiles balks and redirects his thoughts. “Yeah, I didn’t see him. Might be sick. I don’t know.”

“Might be sick or…” Scott lowers his voice. “You think he’s hurt, and he doesn’t want people to see? You think his dad hurt him or something?”

“Scott, you don’t even know if his dad hurt him at all,” Stiles points out. Stiles is a good judge of character, and his father has always told him to trust his gut, but he never rests without evidence nowadays. Collecting facts and proofs so that there are no holes in his theories. Scott trusts his instincts over any Google search, and sometimes, it is enough to convince Stiles to come along without being shown every detail of a person’s family tree. This is not one of those times. “I’m not saying that you’re _wrong_ _,_ dude. I’m just saying, you’re kinda… biased when it comes to this stuff.”

“Biased?” Scott thinks a lot of things about himself, but he always considered himself fair.

“Yeah, you know. You’ve seen so many people who’ve been hurt before, it’s like you can’t imagine a scenario when a bruise is just a bruise,” Stiles starts with a shrug that is barely perceptible beneath his lacrosse pads. “Isaac could be part of an underground fight club for all we know.”

Scott raises a brow.

“Not likely, but no one thought Ed Norton was Brad Pitt either,” Stiles points out. “Look, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying I need some more proof before I go tell my dad anything, you know? He could have the _flu_ _,_ and you’re sitting here ready to call Child Services? Just chill, dude. Watch the game. Enjoy warming the bench for the infinitely more handsome, more talented real first-string lacrosse players.”

Scott’s mouth is drawn open in reply when he spots a familiar curly-haired boy limping to the bench. Coach Finstock screams, wildly gesticulating, words that don’t really make sense. Isaac closes his eyes, averts his face, spine stiff. When he’s excused to sit on the bench, he sits on the opposite end from Stiles and Scott, limping in front of them to sit down.

“Glad you could join us,” Stiles says by way of greeting, a small wave down to the end.

Isaac doesn’t acknowledge him.

“We didn’t think you were gonna make it,” Scott tries softly. “Didn’t see you at school today. Were you... sick or something?”

Silence.

“Yeah, no, that’s, uh, sometimes we gotta take a mental health day.” Scott’s laugh is so fake that even Stiles rolls his eyes. Scott’s cheeks burn. “What happened to your ankle?”

Isaac looks over, blue eyes blown wide. Scott immediately recoils, pressing his whole side against Stiles’ to create distance between him and Isaac. The startled anxiety in the boy’s face makes Scott remember every survivor he’s lived with, the importance of boundaries.

“I just… I noticed you were limping a bit. Did you-did you hurt yourself?”

“Mind your own business,” Isaac says, gruff, though his voice pitches in panic. He turns towards the field, hunches over, elbows on knees. Stiles starts cheering about a play, but Scott cannot turn his focus forward. He watches Isaac out of the corner of his eye, letting a portion of the game pass in awkward silence. Isaac fiddles with the strings on his lacrosse stick, bounces nervous energy out of his left leg.

“I once, uh, I once went sledding with Stiles.” He points at his friend for emphasis. If Stiles notices Scott talking about him, he makes no motion towards it. “We were, like, seven or something, and there was, like, one inch of powder on the ground. But we hadn’t seen snow in ages, so we snuck out with trash can lids and tried to sled down my street.” Isaac stubbornly faces forward, but there’s something in the stiffness of his posture that tells Scott he’s listening. “So, you know, we shouldn’t have gotten too far, but the sidewalk was iced over, and when Stiles gave me a push, I went _flying_ _._ Ended up with a sprained ankle and a broken jaw after I hit my neighbor’s car at the bottom of the road.” Scott chuckles, forced, and runs a hand through his hair. “I went to this place called the, uh, called the Rose Shelter.” Scott lies, hoping to jog Isaac’s memory, to convince him to use the information on the hundred pamphlets he had been discarding all week. Isaac’s face slowly turns towards him in silent recognition. "They helped me out. With the injury.”

Isaac’s face is an amalgam of emotion, part confused, part furious, part touched.

“They could probably help you too—” Scott starts.

“Would you leave me alone?” Isaac barks and turns back to the field with finality.

Scott’s mouth is drawn open when he feels Stiles’ hand on his arm. “Let it go, buddy. Let it go.”

 

“Maybe he just doesn’t want your help, Scott,” Stiles suggests, mouthful of cafeteria mush that he’s decided isn’t so bad if you don’t pay attention while you’re eating it.

Scott isn’t convinced— about the food or about Isaac. “Or maybe he’s too scared to ask for it.”

  
“There’s no asking involved, man. We killed, like, half an Amazonian rainforest printing those pamphlets for him,” Stiles points out. “He read them. He knows where he can go. You’ve done all you can, bro. Time to move on.”

Scott knows that Stiles’ urgency in dropping the issue isn’t for lack of heart. Stiles can be compassionate, but reserved for those who he attaches to. Scott knows firsthand that Stiles can be downright ruthless if someone steps upon the toes of his loved ones. Scott doesn’t understand this as a character flaw but merely as a portion of Stiles’ personality that didn’t match with his own. He cannot expect Stiles to share his every desire to help people— just like Stiles doesn’t expect Scott to enjoy every adventure he’s dragged into. It’s a balance— because they both end up going along with it in the end, anyway.

“I just feel like… if he would just _listen_ to me, maybe he’d just see that he doesn’t have to live like that—” Scott starts.

“Dude, stop. You’re gonna make yourself crazy trying to change a guy’s life when he doesn’t want it to be changed.”

“How could he _not_ want it to change?” Scott asks rhetorically. “Who would _want_ to go through that sort of thing?”

Stiles shrugs his shoulders. “Probably doesn’t want to go into foster care.”

“He doesn’t have to go into foster care. They wouldn’t haul his mom off to jail unless she was hurting him too—” Scott says.

Stiles’s energy suddenly drains from him. Scott watches the shift with careful eyes, drops his words on the tip of his tongue. Stiles pokes at his congealed mass of food with a plastic fork, looks up at Scott like he doesn’t care, but Scott knows better. “No, uh, he doesn’t have a mom... anymore,” Stiles mutters. “He… remember in the fourth grade? When we had that Mother Appreciation breakfast with our class? Isaac and I sat in the back of the room together with our dads. His mom died a few months before. Some freak accident at her work.”

Scott goes quiet. “Then we’ve really gotta help him, Stiles. He doesn’t have anyone.”

Just then, the doors to the cafeteria swing open, and Isaac himself limps in, face turned to the ground, hood pulled over his head. Scott and Stiles share a look, and even Stiles seems skeptical. Isaac makes a beeline to their table, surprisingly conspicuous for a boy whose entrance was like one in one of Melissa’s telenovelas. When he gets there, he slams his fists on the table, causing the plastic trays to jump and Stiles and Scott to follow suit.

 _“Stop_ stalking me,” he warns, and when he picks up his head, Scott has to bite his lip to hold in a sound of surprise. The side of Isaac’s face is a patchwork of blacks and purples and greens— his lip fat, his eye slightly swollen. “I mean it. _Stop stalking me, Scott.”_

Scott attempts a nod that is mostly just a jerk of nervousness. Isaac glares as hard as he can with his bruised face and limps off. When Scott looks down, he sees that Isaac left behind a crumpled piece of paper, flecked with blood. Stiles rolls it out flat on the table. It’s a white sheet with just a number on it— and a message.

_Just in case._

“What is this?” Stiles asks, looking it over. “Did he just give you his number?” Scott buries his face in his hands. “This is one really fucked up seduction. He could have at least—”

“No, it’s not his number,” Scott says. “It’s mine." Stiles reads the paper more carefully, eyes widening at the recognition of the number. "I slipped it into his backpack in history class the other day. I thought it was less obvious than a pamphlet, in case his dad found it.”

“Apparently not.”

 

Scott calls his mom after lunch, tucked down a long, empty corridor. She answers her phone, groggy with sleep. After a graveyard shift, she had come home, downed a cup of coffee, made a few important phone calls, and passed out on the couch, leaving a Lean Cuisine in the microwave. “Honey, what is it? Are you all right?” she asks slowly.

“Mom,” Scott is fighting off tears. “I messed up. We’ve gotta do something.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mentions of abuse, alcohol abuse, sexual harassment

Derek Hale wants exactly three things in his life: a tall, cold beer; for his house to never have spontaneously burst into flames with his whole family inside of it; and for the army to stop pretending that Camden Lahey is dead.

He’ll take it in any order. At any costs.

It’s been six years since his grandmother’s birthday party, since the day that a gas leak thoroughly soaked Derek’s life in tragedy. Since Derek had answered Camden’s desperate SOS call and abandoned the party in his father’s Camaro. Six years and he can still smell the smoke and taste the ash. Six years, and no one has bothered to clean up the burnt shell of his life.

The notice of Cam’s Missing in Action status was only announced a few months ago. A few men in uniform showed up at the Lahey’s door with a folded up flag and grim faces. From what Derek could nudge out of Isaac, Mr. Lahey had gone catatonic almost instantly. Isaac had been the one to pour the lemonade, to sit the men on the living room couch, to listen to details he didn’t fully understand except that his brother wasn’t where he was supposed to be and that wasn’t _dead_ _,_ but it was as close to dead as a live soldier could be.

Derek constantly contacts the number that the men left behind, always ends the conversations by slamming down his phone. Until Camden’s lifeless body is found, Derek wants to assume that he is alive. Once every few weeks, since the news, he comes by the Lahey house with something that Laura made very poorly— a vegetable tray with only broccoli, some cupcakes without an egg in them— offering no news but an empty smile.

Isaac takes what kindnesses he can find these days, approaches them like they’re going to scurry away when he reaches out his fingertips. He chokes on burnt casseroles, thanks Derek for his smiles. He never complains. Ever.

Reading Isaac is a lot like reading Camden, but there’s years of secrecy added to Isaac’s life, so it’s a bit harder. The boy has a deceptively sharp tongue, for such a quiet kid. When Derek takes him out to lunch, brings him to a family party— _family party,_ more like lets him come watch Laura and Cora argue about which Winchester brother is hottest over TV dinners— he witnesses the sting of Isaac’s words, and he smiles because he hears Camden in it. Sarcasm and sharp edges, but good intentions beneath the ice.

He _notices_ _._ How could he not notice? Isaac carries bruises on his skin like fading tattoos. Derek cannot remember the last time he saw the boy without some sort of injury. He accepts klutziness as an excuse because he doesn’t think he can stomach the alternative. It’s selfish. _He’s_ selfish. He hates himself for it.

Which brings him to the tall, cold beer.

He needs one. Now. Right now.

 

Laura is in the middle of a level of _Portal_ when her phone buzzes in her pocket. She pauses with a snarl, mouth half-full of Cheetos when she mumbles around her food, “What, Derek? I’m in the middle of a game.” If it were her boss or the cute counselor from the high school, she might have attempted a lie about cleaning her house or fixing her car (both of which she _could_ do but constantly chose not to), but it’s Derek who has seen her period-stained underwear hanging from the towel rack in the bathroom. Hiding things from him is pointless and more work than Laura cares to do.

She’s _the_ adult, technically, and has been since her house burnt to the ground without her inside it, but that doesn’t mean she’s _an_ adult.

“I’m drunk,” Derek says in that heavy, inebriated voice of his. It’s thick but not slurred. More tired than intoxicated.

“And I’m a few pounds overweight. What am I supposed to do with that information, Derek?” Laura quips back, turning her game off pause.

“I need you… to come and get me.” It’s not a demand or a plea. It’s a declaration of fact. Derek doesn’t need a lot, but he needs this now. Not that Laura wants to give it to him.

“You’re twenty-four years old. Call a cab yourself, dipshit,” she says, out of love, really.

“If you don’t pick me up,” Derek warns, slow, “I’ll drive home.”

Laura swears under her breath, red in the face with anger. “First off, _fuck_ you. I’m kicking your ass when you get home because that’s not a fucking _joke_ , Derek. It’s not _fucking_ funny.” Contrary to popular belief, Laura Hale doesn’t just swear when angry. Half the words in her lexicon happen to be inappropriate for younger audiences, and she likes to use them in their various forms as often as possible. “Second, stay wherever the fuck you are, and I’ll be there soon. I’ve got to find some pants or something. Jesus.”

 

The bar is called Lunar, and it’s some kitschy, dank place with an overpriced food menu but enough beer on tap to keep a steady flow of customers. After Laura slips into a pair of Cora’s skinny jeans and one of Derek’s tee shirts that makes her look like a child raiding her father’s closet, she carefully guides herself through side roads to the hole-in-the-wall. She parks down the block and addresses each catcall with a pointed middle finger.

Inside, she spots her brother at the bar, sandwiched between two large gentlemen in leather and chains. She squeezes between them. “Yeah, excuse me. Pardon me. Big sister coming to rip her brother a new one.” She puts an elbow on the bar, props her chin into it, offers a false, red lipstick smile. “Hello, brother dearest. Your chauffeur has arrived.”

“I think I killed Cam.” Derek stares into the bottom of his glass. “If I woulda just saved him, he wouldn’t have gone… and… and signed up for the stupid army, you know? Does that make sense?”

Laura sees that his eyes don’t focus. She sighs. “No, Der, it doesn’t make sense, now come on. I’ve got _Here Comes Honey Boo Boo_ on DVR, and I’m sure you’ll find it really funny while you’re drunk. Up and at ‘em, tiger,” she say, pulling on his arm in vain. His muscles are nearly equal in size to her thighs. Tugging on him is like tugging on a tree trunk.

“Laura.” Derek turns very seriously to his sister. He doesn’t acknowledge her attempt to uproot him. “Laura, I _killed_ my best friend ‘cause I was a pussy. He wouldn’ta fucking gone to war if-if I woulda stopped it.”

“No, no, come on, dipshit. We’re not doing Triple-D today. Let’s go.” Depressing Drunk Derek, the Derek that periodically crept into their lives after systematically and abruptly losing too many people he cared about over the years. The only good thing Cora and Laura had found in Triple-D was his ability to actually share emotion.

Everything else sucked.

“Mr. Lahey,” Derek continues. Laura dramatically sighs, places her forehead against the bar, ignoring the peanut shells that stick to her skin. “Mr. Lahey beat the shit out of him. Them. Did you know that? That Mr. Lahey beat up Camden and his little brother?”

Laura’s insides turn to ice. When she picks up her head, it’s with horror drawn across her features.

“And I knew it was happening, but I didn’t say it because I… because I’m a _bastard_ , Laura. I’m a stupid bastard. If I woulda told… If I woulda told, Cam wouldn’ta signed up for the war, wouldn’ta signed his life away for a few checks to send back to Isaac.”

With a shake of her head, Laura plants her feet and tightens her grip, pulling Derek with all her might. “We aren’t doing this here, Derek. Come on. Come get in the car.”

Derek gets to his feet, compliant but too drunk to follow straight forward. Laura wraps his tree-trunk arm over her shoulder, grumbling about lifelong back massages and ground-worshipping. They part the crowd as they stumble past, Laura coaxing, Derek going without a fight.

“Hey, sweetheart, that shirt don’t look like it fit right,” a thickly accented voice calls as they pass. “Want me to help get it off you?” There are sniggers. Derek yanks them to a halt.

Not slouching, full-height, in theory, Derek should look intimidating. But as it is, he’s inebriated, swaying, kind of cross-eyed, red-cheeked. He should look intimidating, but he mostly looks like a Cabbage Patch Kid. A big, drunk Cabbage Patch Kid.

“That’s my _sister_ _,”_ he grumbles.

“Good, so she ain’t taken!” the guy exclaims with a howl of laughter.

“We’re _leaving_ _,”_ Laura says, gritting her teeth and pulling on Derek’s arm with her heels dug into the ground.

A big, drunk, _strong_ Cabbage Patch Kid.

In normal situations, she would have a drink down that guy’s face or a pool ball in his nose, but desperate times called for desperate measures. If getting Derek out of the bar without an incident meant sucking up her pride, she would do— oh, nope. Derek punched the guy.

The fight is short. Derek gets in one good swing before the smaller but more sober man pummels him into the ground.

It’s much harder dragging Derek to the car when he is barely conscious.

 

At the Emergency Room, Laura tells the nurses to go ahead and skip the anesthetic because her dumbass brother doesn’t deserve it, but they just chuckle uncomfortably and prep him to get stitched up. An X-Ray reveals a fracture in his eye socket but not much else under the swollen mess of his face.

Melissa McCall checks up on him at three o’clock in the morning, her first patient of her shift.

“A bar fight? Rather ambitious for someone with that BAC,” Melissa laughs, reading his chart. “How’re you feeling, Mr. Hale?”

“Regretfully sober,” Derek grunts, sitting up and pressing an ice pack to one of the beaten regions of his face.

“Yeah, I bet you’re wishing you had a few drinks in you right now,” Melissa teases. “Good news is, you’ll be able to leave here in a few hours, once we’re sure you aren’t concussed, _and_ your insurance covers some pretty kick-ass painkillers.”

Derek attempts a grateful smile but ends up moaning at the stretch of the muscles on his face.

“I think what we’ve learned today is that bar fights are not your thing.” Melissa, as a nurse, is taught that being kind and understanding is the best way to do her job, but she honestly think it depends on the patient. Six-foot-tall I’ve-Got-Biceps-Bigger-Than-Your-Head Derek Hale who went down in a drunken fight defending his sister’s honor is not someone who is going to reply to (or _learn_ from) sweet-as-sugar Nurse McCall. He needs a dose of reality and not nicely. “Okay, hon, I’m Melissa. If you need me, I’m here ‘til eleven o’clock. But hopefully you should be out by then.”

She starts to leave the room, clipboard in hand, when Derek shifts, leaning back on his elbows, peering carefully at her.

“Melissa… Melissa McCall?” he asks, hoarse.

She turns around.

“I talked to you about a buddy of mine… a long time ago.” Derek remembers her face because it was the first one that told him he was doing the right thing. The only one. “About his dad.”

Melissa’s face softens. There is no immediate recognition, but she understands easily what he’s saying. There is some grief on his face, and she sits on the edge of his bed. “Yeah, and how’s he doing?” she asks.

“Dead.”

Melissa’s stunned silence mirrors her mind’s inability to select an emotion to feel. Fear. Heartbreak. Horror. It’s all there, all fighting to show on her face. Instead, she just comes up blank, quiet.

“Well, maybe dead,” Derek amends. “He’s MIA in combat. But if you ask the US government,” Melissa can hear the anger in his voice, “they’d say he’s good as dead.” There’s a pause. “Why even bother delineating the things? Don’t say he’s MIA if you’re gonna act like he’s dead, you know? There’s no fucking chance of him surviving if you leave him out in the desert and pretend he’s dead.”

“There’s hope,” Melissa tells him softly. “At the very least, he got away on his own terms.”

Derek laughs a bitter laugh, the sound of someone much older who’s seen too much. “Not even then. If it were up to Cam, he and his little brother would be in Los Angeles right now. Poor as shit, but they’d be together. But instead, Cam’s dead, and Isaac’s stuck with an abusive _fuck_ of a parent—”

It all hits Melissa like a tidal wave, flashes of images and words striking her hard in the chest. Derek Hale and his friend Camden Lahey. Four times at the ER in a few months. Little brother at home. Isaac. Isaac. Isaac.

She’s made a terrible mistake.

 

She spends her morning doing whatever she is supposed to do but not consciously. Years of routine work keep her hands moving, but her mind is at Beacon Hills High School, in Derek Hale’s hospital room. It’s been nearly ten years since Derek approached her in the hallway, desperate and angry. Ten years since she allowed her son to take precedence over two young victims— as she always did, _as she should have_ _._ Ten years of Isaac Lahey being exposed to abuse at the hands of a parent, and she _forgot._

At half past seven in the morning, her eyes are burning with exhaustion. She checks her watch, waits for the text from Scott that tells her that Stiles didn’t forget him on the way to school—he never has— and nurses more cups of coffee than patients. She catches herself with a mind full of dark, self-hating thoughts and pushes them to the side. As a parent, she had done the right thing. Scott had needed her attention, and as her child, he deserved it. It doesn’t do much to make her feel better, but it’s a slight comfort, in the midst of all the guilt.

She drives home slowly, too tired to attempt any speed over twenty-five miles an hour, and after bustling with last minute errands, she collapses onto the couch for a deep sleep.

Her ringing phone wakes her. Seeing Scott’s five-year-old face flash on her screen sends an instant shot of panic up her spine. Still struggling with the grips of sleep, she answers. “Honey, what is it?” She straightens on the couch. “Are you all right?”

“Mom.” She can hear him fighting back tears even over the phone, and her heart sinks. “I messed up. We’ve gotta do something.”

“What’s going on, kiddo? What do you need?”

Scott’s breathing is ragged, but not in the asthmatic way, which grossly makes Melissa less nervous. He sniffs hard. “I-I know you told me that it was none of our business, but I… I’ve been giving Isaac pamphlets for the Rose Shelter,” he admits because there is no use in lying now, and he’s never made a habit of lying to his mother before anyway. “I gave him my number, too, since he wasn’t really looking at the pamphlets and…” He chokes on his words, and Melissa can hear Stiles’s voice, distant, in the background.

“Scott, there you are! ...Are you okay?”

“Mom, I think his dad found it, and I got Isaac in a lot of trouble. A _lot_ of trouble.”

Melissa hears the pounding of feet, Stiles rapidly approaching her son. She pinches the bridge of her nose. “It’s okay,” she tells him, a promise she doesn’t know she can keep but needs to make. “It’s gonna be okay. I was wrong before. It’s our business to help people who need us, Scott, and we’re gonna help Isaac, okay? So take a few deep breaths. Tell Stiles to take you out to the courtyard for some fresh air. I don’t care if you miss a few classes, okay? Calm down. Go eat something besides that awful cafeteria food.”

“Hey, it’s not that bad.” Stiles’ voice, quiet in the background.

“Go on. I’ll figure it out.”

 

Melissa is, technically, a pursuer.

With a traditional Hispanic family who raised her to be the best mother and wife she could be, she pursued an education first and then a family second. She does not consider one a more important pursuit than the other.

With Rafael, she pursued his companionship to the point where her electives happened to line up with his major classes, where he was forced to recognize her not just as another one of those nursing students but as a nursing student who was suddenly better in his subject matter than he was.

With her job, she pursued the hospital administrators, the ones who said they had no more room on their staff for her, even though they _did_ _._ What they meant was they had no more room for women of color on their staff, like they had already met their quotient of qualified colored ladies, and her skills and dedication wouldn’t change that. (They did. And they got the administration changed as well.)

But with the survivors? She hadn’t pursued them, really. A few, like Bobby Parrish, she had inserted herself into a situation to keep them from immediate harm, but typically, they came to her. Or she made an offer, and they accepted. Never before had she _chased_ a victim— mostly because that seemed counter-productive to her desire to prove to them that she was a safe person to be with, but also because there was no need; most people wanted to be saved but couldn’t figure out how.

Isaac Lahey was different.

How could she save someone who didn’t want to be saved?

 _Could_ she save someone who didn’t want to be saved?

Well, she’d try.

 

Parents could watch lacrosse practices. This was found out by no particular announcement, just a happenstance discovery by parents who were curious, who filtered into the bleachers when they showed up early to collect their children, parents who wanted to see their typically-benched child on the field. Bobby Finstock either is so focused on blowing his whistle that he doesn’t notice the parents’ presence or he doesn’t think they are important enough to acknowledge. Either way, Melissa knows she is safe to wander onto the field when she wants to.

She typically comes early in the season, when the weather is still hot enough to trigger an asthma attack in Scott. She had coached Stiles, once, through what to do with the inhaler, when he should call an ambulance, for those times that she couldn’t be there— but she always feels better being physically available in case something goes wrong. Once or twice, she’s patched up scrapes and sprains as a means of actively participating on the team.

Tonight, she knows there will be at least a few scrapes and bruises to mend, so she brings her First Aid kit to the bleachers. When she sits, she offers a wave to her son who nods back in reply, a bright smile on his face as he nudges Stiles to attention. The taller boy frantically waves his arms around in somewhat of a windmill-type wave and gesticulates wildly to a boy on the other side of the field. Melissa pinches the bridge of her nose.

Stiles has a lot of good qualities, but he’s about as subtle as a parade float.

Coach Finstock has to take a call in the middle of practice and allows the boys some time to catch their breaths. Melissa scoots down to the first row of bleachers. Scott jogs over, face blotchy, chest heaving. “Hey, Mom,” he says with a smile. He leans in to kiss her cheek, and Melissa dives backwards, hands up.

“Oh, no way. I can smell you from here, thanks.”

Scott steps back. “Did you see him?”

Melissa bites her lip. “I’m assuming he’s the one with the limp.”

“Yeah, now we’ve just got to get him to come over here. He won’t come near me,” Scott mutters.

Stiles appears at his side, peeling off his helmet to reveal a goofy grin. “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ve got you covered.”

He starts away, and Melissa lurches forward seizing a handful of his jersey. “No, I am actually _very_ worried. What are you going to do, Stiles?” She has seen some of his plans in action, and she can’t say that they’ve all been with good consequences.

“Mrs. M, it’s fine. It’s nothing illegal,” Stiles says. “I mean, not by civil law.”

As he jogs off, Melissa stares in his wake. When she looks at Scott, she’s despondent. “What does that mean?”

“I wish I could tell you.”

When the coach blows the whistle, Scott runs off to the field, and practice resumes very fluidly. For a while, the boys run drills, picking up where they left off. They look graceful in a way that pubescent teenaged boys don’t when they’re off the field. Melissa sits back, watches with interest.

In the middle of a defensive drill, Stiles nearly tackles Isaac to the ground. They land on the soft grass with a clatter of plastic pads hitting together, dull thuds in the dirt. Stiles moans rather dramatically, and Isaac rolls into a sitting position, entirely silent but clutching at his ankle with scarred knuckles.

Melissa takes this as a cue.

Coach blows his whistle half a dozen times, furious, short breaths, as he storms to his injured players. “Stilinski, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Are you playing lacrosse or football? That was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen!” he bellows.

As Finstock spits grievances into Stiles’ masked face, Melissa treads to Isaac. He wrenches off his helmet with mild frustration and attempts to roll into a standing position. He hisses in pain, clutching at his aching limb again.

“Easy there,” Melissa says. “I saw that. It looked like it hurt.”

Isaac releases his ankle like he’s just been burned. “It… it’s all right. I’ve taken harder hits,” he placates.

“Want me to look at that ankle of yours?” Melissa asks. The team has gravitated in a circle around Stiles and Coach as the two bicker. A ring of laughter rises from the group, and Isaac shakes his head vehemently.

“No, it’s… it’s fine. No big deal. Just stung a bit when I—”

“I insist,” Melissa says, lifting her First Aid kit. “I’m a nurse. That’s what I’m here for.”

Isaac knows better than to argue with an adult, and even though he wants to fight, he bites his tongue and leans away from her touch, silent.

Melissa helps wiggle the cleat off Isaac’s foot, and she hears a small whimper of pain bubble on his lips. She knows he’s trying to hide it so does not address him with an apology. Instead, she slips the shoe off with careful hands and peels off his sock, sticky with sweat and covered in flecks of grass.

The ankle is swollen, like Isaac has inserted a small tennis ball under his skin. It’s black and blue and purple, a myriad of colors not ingrained in the human body.

“Okay, you should probably come with me, kiddo,” Melissa says without opening up her kit.

“Come with you where? I’ve got— I’ve got practice,” Isaac says weakly. She can see cogs turning in his mind, sees him knowing “nurse” and “hospital” go together and “hospital” and “consistent injuries” lead to questions he cannot answer which leads, eventually, to more pain.

She doesn’t want him to panic and shut down and never attempt to trust her, so she suggests, “Do you think you can make it to the bleachers?”

Isaac breathes a visible sigh of relief. “Yeah. Totally.”

Melissa helps him to his feet, gathers up his discarded gear and her aid kit, and has to force herself not to loop an arm around him for support as he limps, heavy, to the bleachers. She gets him to prop his leg up and rifles around inside.

“I saw you got some bruises and cuts on your face,” she says nonchalantly, not looking up. “Do you want me to look at those too?”

“No, these are… these are nothing. Old. I’m fine.”

“What’d you do?” She hopes if she keeps up the passive voice, she can catch him off-guard, though she doubts it. He seems to be the kind of boy who always has his guard up— a residual affect of nearly a decade of abuse.

“Fell.”

“You fell on your face?” Melissa asks, not sounding doubtful (even though she is), merely interested. Isaac nods. “Did you fall on your ankle too?”

“Um, yeah.”

She nods, allows his uncertainty to settle in the silence. She carefully starts wrapping his ankle in a soft bandage. “Did you clean out the cuts, at least?” she asks, admonishing nurse and mother. Isaac shakes his head. “Can I do that? It’d be going against everything a nurse stands for to walk away from cuts that could get infected,” she teases, and maybe it’s her light, non-judgmental manner, but Isaac’s chin jerks in a nod of approval. “You’re gonna want to stay off this ankle as much as you can,” she warns him. “I’d get an x-ray if possible because you could have torn something pretty serious in there. I know you don’t want to miss lacrosse season—” She supplies the excuse for him. “But a few weeks out of commission is better than a long term injury causing you to lose your running ability for the rest of your life.”

Minutes pass in silence, with her working on his ankle and then his face, dabbing with alcohol and cotton balls. He flinches as her hands approach his face but not at all with the sting of the peroxide. While she works, Isaac is eerily silent. No hissing pain through his teeth, no grunts of annoyance. He pulls his knees to his chest, makes himself small. If she wasn’t so intimately in his personal space, Melissa would have forgotten that Isaac was there at all.

“I think you’re all cleaned up,” she says, satisfied but not really. The cuts are clean, and Isaac’s ankle is properly wrapped, but there is a distinct sick feeling in her, like the contents of her stomach curdled while she worked. She doesn’t want to let him limp away from her tonight— or ever.

“Thank you.” Isaac stands, tenderly testing the weight on his ankle. Melissa watches the briefest of flickers of pain on his face before he fits his lips into a convincing smile. He starts back to the field, and it takes a few moments for Melissa to gather her courage before she stops him.

“Wait, Isaac!” she exclaims. She walks over, fingering the card for the Rose Shelter in her pocket. When she stops in front of him, she sees the twitching of his frayed nerves, the jump of fear in his eyes, so instead of pushing, she says, “I’ll come to practice next week, check on that ankle for you, if you need me to.”

He nods, slight. “Okay, thanks.”

“How about… what if I give you my number? In case you have any questions on First Aid?” She starts to fish her phone out of her pocket.

Isaac takes a step back. “No, that’s… I don’t need that.”

“Oh, honey, it’s not a big deal—” Melissa starts.

“No,” Isaac firmly interrupts, though she hears a tremor at the edges of his words. His gaze dances from her to a spot behind her head. “No, really. Thanks.”

He half-jogs, half-limps back to the field. Melissa follows the line of his vision. She sees, sitting on the lowest level of bleachers, David Lahey, hands in his pockets, chewing on a piece of gum, looking both angry and satisfied at the same time. When Melissa takes a seat down the bench from him, she has to force herself to watch the field.

“What were you talking to my son about?” he asks her, forcefully but not angrily. “Isaac. What were you talking to him about?”

Melissa has to swallow pride, disgust, and fear before she turns over and puts a bright smile on her face. “Oh, just about his ankle. How to wrap it. It looks like a pretty bad injury.”

“He’s just a princess,” David says, waving his hand.

“No,” Melissa tries to remain light, conversational, but there is a flare of rage on her lips. “No, it was pretty bad. Not that it’s any of my business, but I actually think you should take him to a hospital as soon as possible.”

David is quiet. “You’re right.”

Melissa looks over in surprise.

“It isn’t any of your business, so don’t talk to my son again.”

And with that, he’s gone.

 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mentions of physical abuse
> 
> I am so sorry that this update took so long and that it is such a puny one. I have been crazy busy, but I'm so desperate not to keep people waiting that I just cut it off here. Hope you like it! Also, thank you guys so much for the kind words about the story! It's stuff like that that reminds me why I'm writing it in the first place. Enjoy!

Melissa cannot make her schedule so that she can come to every lacrosse practice, but she tries. It takes a lot of switching shifts and bribing with coffee, but she makes it to at least one practice a week, and she figures more would scare Isaac away anyway. It’s nothing official, of course, but Melissa becomes his medical expert, the mender of his injuries— of the ones she can see, anyway.

He is still skittish around her, likes to dance on the edges of her boundaries, but he starts to smile more, to talk without a stutter. It takes a few weeks, but once she even gets him to laugh. It’s a surprising laugh, genuine but controlled. Melissa feels a smile grow wide on her lips when she hears it.

His lies get more complicated when he realizes that Melissa isn’t someone who is quickly exiting his life. He used to “fall”, but now he has a story, one that starts the night before with a study session for a history test and ends with tripping over himself in the cafeteria during the spaghetti lunch. He has a knack for keeping track of the lies, so well that sometimes Melissa wonders if they’re lies at all. But she knows.

He’s never said a single word about his father.

She doesn’t push for it because she knows that any steps forward will convert into leaps back if she tries. Melissa considers herself an expert at careful interaction with the survivors she comes across, and even though everything is the same with Isaac Lahey, it’s so different at the same time. He needs the same space, the same quiet, the same calm. Her movements need to be slow and announced, soft.

But she sees in him an interesting dichotomy: someone who has so much self-control, who trains himself to hide even the harshest pangs of pain, someone who can dedicate himself so fully to a lie that he will run on a busted ankle like he feels nothing at all. He’s incredibly gifted at reading other people, finding the cues in any situation. As he warms up to Melissa, he grills her with questions so he is never in the dark about her actions.

“What are you doing? What kind of bandage is that? How is that going to affect me? Where are you going? What’s in the First Aid kit? When are you coming to practice again? Who? What? When? Where? Why?”

The moment he cannot read a situation, there is a deep panic that settles into his chest, and it starts a trickle-down wave of loss of control. She can see it in his eyes, the fear as he struggles to understand, where he realizes that he cannot monitor his breathing or his flinching. She tries to keep up, explaining everything she can in short breaths of time. Sometimes, she notices a moment too late, and he’s scurrying back onto the field before she can finish plastering a band-aid to his forehead.

That’s where Scott normally comes in, swooping in Isaac’s orbit with watchful eyes and a concerned smile. He’s bitter, still, that Melissa will not make a bolder move in her endeavor to save Isaac Lahey, but he rarely says as much. He mostly just rants to Stiles about it over video games and Pepsi, or while they’re running drills in the backyard.

“I get why my mom isn’t pushing him,” Scott admits, casually tossing the ball in Stiles’ direction. “I just wish it wasn’t taking so long, you know?”

“Dude, watch your aim,” Stiles demands, dodging the ball as it whizzes nearly into his face.

“Like, did you see him at school this morning? He can barely _walk_ anymore,” Scott continues, ignoring Stiles. He easily catches the ball and throws it badly, nearly whipping it into Stiles’ gut. “Mom always says, ‘if you can help, do it’. And I’m _trying_ , but _she’s_ the one who’s making it so hard.”

“Earth to Scott, if you don’t aim this next pass, I’m going to tackle you into the shrubbery.”

“No one deserves to get beat up, you know, but Isaac _especially._ He just seems like a nice guy—”

“Did you come to that conclusion before or after he non-verbally threatened your life in the cafeteria?”

“I just can’t even imagine— _oomph_ _!_ ”

Stiles does, indeed, tackle Scott into the hastas after a lacrosse ball nearly clips him in the ear. They roll around in the mud, more laughter than grunts of pain, when they hear a car door slam, and a deep, authoritative voice calling from the side of the house.

“ _Hey_ _,_ what are you kids doing?”

They pause— Stiles has three fingers in Scott’s mouth, and Scott has a fistful of Stiles’ shirt balled in his hand. When they look up and see the intruder, Scott smiles around Stiles’ thumb. “Maa,” is the only sound that he can articulate, a joyous mispronunciation of a name.

Bobby Parrish pushes his sunglasses into his hair and smiles across the yard. “Hey, kid. Did ya miss me?”

 

Inside, Melissa hugs Bobby for about a minute straight, squeezing with all the strength she has. When she pulls back, they’re both laughing, and she brushes blonde locks at his hairline. Holding him at arm’s length, she quirks her lips into a genuine grin. “I cannot _believe_ you’re here!” she exclaims, an almost girly squeal, if Melissa McCall did such a thing. “The last letter I got from you, you were in Afghanistan!”

Correspondence with Bobby had been patchy for years, but still more consistent than most of Melissa’s survivors. He had jumped from camp to camp then from desert to desert, fulfilling his duty as a soldier to the best of his ability and always, _always_ thinking about his family back home. His father had died of pneumonia just four years before, and Bobby had been dismantling bombs in Afghani cities and was too busy to come home for the funeral.

He hadn’t heard from his mom in about seven years, since she admitted herself into rehab and never resurfaced.

They don’t talk about that. They don’t talk about the war. Melissa doesn’t want to know about his explosive devices, about his kill count, about his tragedy. Bobby Parrish is an extraordinary boy in that he rarely talks about his feelings while not burying his emotions, but he is still keeps a good head on his shoulders. Melissa appreciates his stolidness, appreciates that he understands her reluctance to talk about the dark stuff on the night of his homecoming.

They sit down for dinner— Melissa, Scott, Bobby, and Stiles— and they pass the salad bowl around like they’re a well-practiced family. Chatter is rampant, mostly Bobby telling stories about nights on base, the sand in his boots, the light-hearted moments that he found out in the desert. He mentions a training drill in which a cargo Jeep rolled over his ankle, says his physical rehab will never get him to the fitness he was before, but he certainly was not crippled by his injury.

Stiles babbles question after question, until John honks his horn outside the house, and the boy takes his leave. Scott busies himself with clearing the table, and Melissa takes Bobby into the living room, settles him down on the couch with a mug of tea. “Honey, I’m so happy to see you,” she tells him quietly, a soft smile on her face.

“I couldn’t come back to Beacon Hills and not stop by,” Bobby laughs. “Besides, you’re going to be seeing a lot more of me lately, so I figured I’d start you off with something easy, like dinner.”

Melissa knits her brow, straightens her spine. “What do you mean?”

“I just got a job at the sheriff’s station,” Bobby says with a proud smile, like he’s been bursting to tell her all night. “I’m starting as a deputy in two weeks, once I get a place and get on my civilian feet with my semi-busted ankle.”

If Melissa could, she’d squeal like a little girl. Instead, she makes an adult noise of appreciation and lurches forward to wrap him in an awkward hug, keeping the tea inside their respective cups. “I’m so proud of you! I can’t imagine anyone more perfect for the job.”

“I hope so,” Bobby admits. He quiets, taps anxious fingers on his mug. “Though, Melissa, I’ve got kind of an ulterior motive for coming here— I’m not gonna lie to you.”

Melissa knits her brow in gentle concern, sets aside her drink. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just… I was hoping that,” Bobby starts. He seems shy suddenly, like he’s never been before, ducking his head and momentarily avoiding eye contact while he gathers courage up in his chest. “I was hoping that, for old time’s sake, I might be able to sleep in your guest room for a little while?”

 

Scott makes up the guest bedroom with a new set of sheets while Bobby drowns himself in the steam of a hot shower. When he gets out, he tucks a towel securely around his waist and attempts to find a scrap of clothing that doesn’t need to be washed. “I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since I got back,” he admits to Scott who is curiously meditative while shoving a pillow into its case. “I finished physical therapy in Germany, and like an idiot, I forgot to make any sort of plan for my homecoming. I don’t think I’ve taken a good shower in two weeks,” he jokes.

Scott sniffs a laugh but doesn’t look up. Bobby knits his brow.

“You all right, kiddo?” he asks with genuine concern. “You haven’t been very talkative tonight.”

Scott wheels around, wide innocent eyes when he looks at his friend. “Bobby, how long are you staying here?” he bursts, like he’s been fighting so hard to keep the words in his chest.

Bobby blinks in shock. “Not too long. Just until I can meet with a realtor about this condo, get the details ironed out. Why?” he questions with a laugh. “You want me outta here any time soon?” He’s not offended. It’s not in his nature.

Scott’s answer is a conflicted shake of his head.

Bobby sits on the edge of the mattress. “What’s going on with you? Everything all right?”

“There’s a guy.” It bubbles off his lips before he can even pretend he wants to keep Isaac’s private life secret. It’s just the opposite. Scott respects the privacy of most people, despite sometimes asking ignorantly invasive questions, but in the case of Isaac Lahey, he wants everyone to know that he deserves to be treated better.

Bobby raises a brow. “Are you asking for dating advice or…?”

“His name is Isaac. And he needs to live here too.”

Bobby’s face twists into one of total understanding. “Don’t worry. When he comes, I can just sleep on the couch—”

“No, he _needs_ to live here, but he won’t,” Scott explains rather desperately.

“I don’t…” Bobby thinks for a moment. “I don’t think I’m understanding.”

“He won’t let us help him, Bobby,” Scott desperately emphasizes. He throws himself onto the mattress, lands on his back with his hands over his face. “But I hate just sitting around like this.”

Bobby leans back, lays down beside Scott, stares at the ceiling in contemplative silence. “That’s tough,” he admits, lacing his hands behind his head.

“What do I do?” Scott asks. “Did you ever ask anyone for help?”

Bobby shakes his head. “It’s hard, especially when it’s your own parent.”

“Then why did you come here?” Scott asks, curious, not combative. “What made you change your mind?”

“Your mom is a pretty persuasive lady, Scott,” Bobby laughs.

“I’m serious!” Scott exclaims.

Bobby sits up, shrugs his broad shoulders. “I trusted her.”

“Why?”

“Saving me wasn’t going to do anything for her, and she did it anyway,” Bobby says. There were scores of people who walked in and out of his life, people who saw bruises and scars and signs of malnutrition, but they also saw an indomitable spirit in Bobby and decided that he couldn’t be wrecked that badly, if his head was on so straight, that they didn’t want to stir up a big fuss if was quote-unquote _fine_ _._ “She took a beating for me, and she had no idea who I was.”

Scott’s eyes light up. Bobby backtracks.

“I’m not telling you to take a beating for this Isaac guy,” he quickly adds. But Scott’s on his feet, all grins and radiating relief. Bobby watches warily as he walks away. “Scott, what are you gonna do?”

“You said Mom _did_ something, right?” Scott asks. “I’m gonna do something to show Isaac he can trust me.”

“What are you gonna do?”

Scott’s still smiling when he says, “I have no idea.”

 

Scott charges into school like he knows what he’s doing with his life, a new confidence that he’s never worn within the halls of Beacon Hills High. He strolls through the halls with a straight spine and a goofy smile, thumbs hooked into his backpack straps, a gait that says he’s ready for anything.

When he strolls into homeroom, he locates Isaac like he’s a beacon that Scott’s attached to, hovers by his desk until Isaac breaks obstinate ignorance and looks up from his sketchbook. “Hi, Scott,” he says, voice hoarse, quiet. He turns back to his drawing, quick, graceful movements from a hand covered in various bandages.

“Isaac, I have a plan,” Scott tells him, bright.

“Oh yeah? And what’s that?” Isaac asks without lifting his head.

“I’m taking you out to dinner.”

Isaac looks up.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: So this chapter is kinda short, I feel like, but I thought I had a good place to end it, so I took it. Enjoy!

The problem with his plan is that it is one that demands to be consensual. He should have thought about the possibility of failing before he confidently strolled into their homeroom, but it’s rare that Scott thinks plans all the way through before he starts to enact them. (Stiles is the plan maker; Scott is the muscle who complains  about the plan.) But here he is, standing in the middle of the aisle of desks, shoe sticking to an old soda stain on the tile floor, fingers looped into his backpack straps. There is a bright hope in that crooked smile, and Isaac merely looks back down to his sketchbook. “No thanks.”

Scott deflates.

“Yeah, but Isaac—”

“I said no thanks.” Factual, not angry.

Scott’s face burns. When he turns around and sees Stiles in his desk, the boy has planted his forehead directly onto the tabletop in exasperation. Some people are beginning to notice, as Scott’s presence in the back of the room is rather atypical for a group of tired high school students who want nothing more than to cop one more nap before the morning bell.

“Can I just—?”

“Scott, I said no.” Isaac’s voice is thin with impatience, a thread of worry at his tips of his words. “Leave me alone.”

“Oh, come on. Let him talk!” someone says from the desk beside Isaac, giving him a playful smack on the arm. Isaac grimaces and glares hard. The boy recoils, but his sentiment does not. Other students start to pipe in their own comments. Isaac is suddenly bombarded on all sides by retorts and calls, people begging to give Scott another chance.

“Fine. What do you want, McCall?” Isaac snaps, just to shut off the deluge of voices around him.

“Just to take you to dinner. After practice tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“I just wanna talk to you,” Scott says, and there are some chittering _awww_ s in the vicinity that he chooses to ignore. “No tricks. That’s all I want to do.”

“Why?”

Scott shifts uncomfortably in his spot. Even Lydia Martin picks up her head from her conversation with the new girl Allison to grace the conversation with her attention. There is a tense thread of silence that rings through them, everyone seeming to suck in their breath and lean forward for the answer.

“Because you seem like an awesome guy,” Scott says with a shrug. He’s never been known for his eloquence, and under pressure is hardly the time to expect a sonnet about the blueness of Isaac’s eyes and the slope of his strong jaw.

Isaac contemplates. “It’s still a no.”

All at once, there is an uproar of noise that eventually channels itself into one loud voice, a chant around the room. “Say yes. Say yes. Say yes.” Isaac’s face burns, and his eyes twitch in every direction while he’s hit hard with the sound. He seems skittish, nervous.

“Fine, whatever, I’ll go!” he snaps, and he does not seem happy about it.

There’s a collective cheer that’s cut off by the arrival of their homeroom teacher, and Scott offers a thankful grin. Everyone slinks back into their desks, a mild line of chatter running through them while the teacher tries to settle the morning excitement. Scott slips back into his desk as Isaac slumps into his, refusing to meet anyone’s eye for the rest of the homeroom period.

When Scott turns to Stiles, Stiles shakes his head. They’re loping down the busy hallways side-by-side. People slink by with books in arm, not ready to greet a miserable school day, and Scott looks like he’s sunshine incarnate.

“Next time you come up with a plan, run it by me first,” Stiles tells him finally, refusing to be harsher on Scott’s victory than he has to.

“But it worked!” Scott exclaims, nearly bouncing with excitement. “He’s gonna go to dinner with me, and I can prove to him that he can trust me.”

“Don’t mean to rain on your parade, but I don’t think forcing him into going on a date with you is going to gain his trust.”

Scott purposefully chooses to ignore the majority of the sentence. “I’m not _forcing_ him. He said yes.”

Stiles rolls his eyes, wheels around so he’s standing in front of Scott and blocking his way into first period biology. “Someone saying ‘yes’ under duress is not consent,” he says with a bit of a sigh. “I know your heart’s in the right place, man, but from the way that whole thing went,” he says with a wild hand movement, “I don’t know if Isaac thinks so.”

 

The thought sits heavy in his chest all day. Scott walks around, more in his head than out of it, and to the point that he doesn’t realize that he’s on his way to practice until Danny Mahealani and his Armani cologne hit him at the same time in the hallway leading to the locker room. He’s conscious of Stiles on his heels, and he whips around. “Dude, I gotta fix this.”

“Fix what?” Stiles asks with a grunt as he dramatic rolls his body to avoid smacking into his friend.

“This Isaac thing. I tried to do the right thing, and I messed it up.” Scott worries his lip between his teeth.

Stiles shrugs his shoulders. “I’m not really the right person to ask on mending emotional breaks,” he admits. “I’m more of the seek-and-destroy type of planner, and I’m not really sure that’s what you’re going for.” He pats Scott on the back, shouldering his way into the locker room. “Come on, dude. I know you didn’t mean to back him into a corner.”

“Yeah, but does _he_ know that?”

Practice is eerily uneventful. The coach barely blows his whistle. There are no pathetic injuries. Even Greenburg seems to be on his best behavior. It’s not their best performance, but it’s not their worst, and with Melissa absent from the bleachers, they’re lucky no one even takes a tumble into the grass.

Or maybe that’s how it seems to Scott, who’s gone on autopilot since he set foot on the pitch.

After practice, he hastily showers and changes from his uniform. Stiles bids him good-bye, and Scott waits outside the locker room door, trying to give Isaac privacy as he hangs back to change. When he comes out, his hair is damp, his clothes are ruffled, and he smells almost dangerously nice.

“Are you ready?” he asks gruffly, shouldering his bag.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Scott blurts.

Isaac’s brow knits. “What?”

“I didn’t mean to force you into this,” Scott admits, shoving nervous hands into his pockets. “I mean, I thought I knew how consent worked, but I guess I just never thought about it applying to stuff like this. B-but Stiles is right. You were kind of forced to say yes, and that’s my fault.” Isaac looks baffled. “I don’t want you to come if you don’t want to. That’s not really the point of me doing this.” He shrugs his shoulders, embarrassed. “So… I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll ask you some other time.”

Isaac says nothing, merely watches as Scott turns on his heel and strides towards the exit. It almost looks like he’s going to let Scott go when he finally blurts, “That’s it?” Scott jerks to a stop and wheels around. “You did all that this morning, and I’m not even getting a free meal out of it?”

Though he’s confused, there is a smile that quirks at Scott’s lips.

Isaac closes the gap between them in easy, long strides. When he’s at Scott’s side, he says, “I showered for this. No backing out now. You owe me dinner.”

Looks like Scott gained Isaac’s trust after all. At least a little bit.

 

It’s a Wednesday night, so the diner is particularly slow. Even with there being only three booths out of the many occupied, waiters and waitresses lack motivation to move quickly. This made typical customers crazy, but Scott harbors an immense patience in him and also an innate respect for workers whose job it is to service him. He and Isaac sit at their booth with some ice waters and a couple of plastic menus for a long while.

They barely pass a word between them.

“I wonder where our waitress is,” Scott muses aloud, trying to break the silence. Isaac merely shrugs his shoulders. “You don’t have anywhere to be, do you?” Isaac shakes his head. “No time limit?”

“Gotta get home before my dad does,” Isaac answers from behind his menu. He drops it and looks at Scott. “But he’s a gravedigger at the Beacon Hills cemetery, so he doesn’t get home until late.”

Scott knows there is irony in an abusive father being a gravedigger, but he cannot seem to place why that is.

“A gravedigger?” he asks by way of creating conversation. “Do you… go to school to do that?”

Isaac looks at him with a quirked brow, condescending in a way that makes Scott’s face burn.

“No. There’s no… grave digging major.” He picks up his menu again. “He was the swim coach a while back, but the school let him go once the team stopped getting results.” He sounds bitter, and Scott is surprised that Isaac feels enough loyalty to his father to feel anger towards a system that mistreated the man. “There was a job offering at the cemetery, so he took it.”

Scott nods in understanding, and he scrambles for something insightful to add. The struggle must be clear on his face because Isaac looks up and chuckles.

“Why are you freaking out?” he asks. “You’re the one who asked me here, not the other way around. At least you know what your motive is.”

“Motive?” Scott asks. “I don’t have a motive.”

“Sure you do,” Isaac answers in a knowing way that breaks Scott’s heart. Has his life been one that is so full of rejection that he cannot imagine someone wanting to enjoy his company without an ulterior motive? (But then Scott remembers that he kind of does, in a way, have an ulterior motive.) “Come on, we’ve probably said ten words to each other in our lives up until a few weeks ago. You stuff my locker full of pamphlets about some _Rose Shelter,_ and then all of a sudden you’re trying to be my new best friend.”

Before Scott can reply, a waitress comes and takes their orders and their menus. They wait until she disappears, and Isaac knits his fingers together over the tabletop. His knuckles are bruised. He leans forward, voice low.

“If you’re here to try and convince me to go to that shelter, Scott, you might as well give up.”

Scott is taken back by his bluntness, by his limited amount of words presented with such deep feeling that they hardly require the disdainful look on his face to cause an understanding.

“I’m here,” Scott says, swallowing, “to have dinner. And apologize. I’ve been… well, basically harassing you, and that’s… that’s really not like me.”

“Then why’d you do it?” Isaac asks, and this is more curious than angry.

Scott hesitates. “Because you’re… interesting to me.”

Isaac sits back with a laugh, crosses his arms over his chest. “Interesting?”

“Yeah.” Scott feels as though he can’t explain it without accusing Isaac of being a liar, without accusing his father of abuse, so he doesn’t explain. He just lets the thread of the conversation fall uncomfortably into silence as he picks at the skin around his thumbnail.

The limited chatter of the diner filters between them. There’s the general clanging and hissing of steam from the kitchen, an elderly couple giggling about something, the wind berating the glass windows beside them. Isaac drums his fingers on the Formica tabletop. Scott tilts the salt shaker and rolls it around and around.

“I’ll tell you what,” Isaac finally says. “I’ll give you as many questions as you can fit in before I finish my burger.” Scott looks up. “Any question.”

Scott thinks. “Any question at all?”

“Whatever you can think of. No sex stuff though. This is a family establishment.”

Their food is delivered, piping hot, and Scott’s wheels are turning so fast he’s almost seeing double. Isaac pours a copious amount of ketchup onto his plate and dunks his French fries.

“Clock’s ticking.”

“Um,” Scott panics. “What’s your favorite color?”

Isaac stops chewing his food and raises a brow. “My favorite color? Really existential, Scott.”

“Well, I don’t know! What am I supposed to ask about?”

“I’m just saying, you get a free-for-all, and the first thing you ask about is my favorite color?” Isaac swallows his fries. “It’s green.”

“Favorite _Lord of the Rings_ book.”

“Never read them.”

Scott ignores the pain in his heart and asks, “Favorite singer?”

“Frank Sinatra.”

“Seriously?”

“Sentimental value.”

“Okay, what is the biggest lie you’ve ever been told?”

“Mrs. Lefoltz telling me that I was going to use calculus later in life.”

“You were complaining about my questions, and now you’re not taking them seriously!” Scott exclaims, though he’s laughing.

“I am very serious about that. When the hell am I ever going to use calculus?” Isaac questions.

“Ever had your heart broken?”

“When my mom died.”

Scott’s heart hammers. He feels as though he needs to keep the pace of the conversation, not allow himself to meditate the answers as they’re given. Isaac answers without hesitation, a quick wit and a surprising honesty, and Scott feels as though if he doesn’t think just as fast, he’ll miss his opportunity to really learn anything about him. His plate is getting emptier mysteriously quickly.

“Ever had a recurring nightmare?”

“I’ve got this one where I’m trapped in one of the lockers at school, and the hallway is flooding with water. And another one that involves rabbits, but I already said no sexual stuff,” he jokes, and Scott can detect the easy deflection in the tone. From Stiles he’s learned to spot when people cover up raw emotion with humor or self-deprecation. But with time ticking, he doesn’t address it.

“Ever been kissed?”

“That involves having girls notice me first.”

“Who’s your best friend?”

“My brother.”

“How’s your relationship with your dad?”

It’s as if time stands still. The conversation grinds to a halt, and the clinking of silverware on plates is suddenly deafening. Isaac looks over with reproachful eyes, a tremor of anger shifting his spine straight. Scott doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe.

“Next question.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I said _next question.”_

“I’ve only got one more,” Scott says. Isaac wipes his mouth with his napkin and struggles to recompose himself. Scott leans forward when he says, “How do you feel about gay bars?”

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: suggestions of abuse
> 
> AN: I am so sorry that this has taken so long and that this chapter is so short. My life has gotten so hectic lately, and I'm only finding moments of the day to update!

“Melissa, I don’t want you to be alarmed, but I just saw Scott walking into a gay bar with Isaac.”

Melissa, honestly, is only vaguely surprised.

“What’re you doing outside a gay bar, Stiles?” she asks, exasperated as she ruffles around her purse for car keys. She pads heavily through the house and blindly stamps on the button to raise the garage door. A yawn slips from her lips.

“Why are you more interested in me than your own son? It’s a _school night,_ Melissa,” Stiles deflects.

“I actually don’t really want to know,” Melissa admits, sliding into her car and starting the engine. “Thanks, Stiles. Go home. Get your homework done.”

“I already did all my homework.”

“I’m not your father. Don’t lie to me.”

“It’s not gonna take me that long,” he grumbles before hanging up.

Melissa backs her car down the driveway and picks up her phone once more. She feels rationally ridiculous when she presses a button on her phone and asks, “Siri, where is the nearest gay bar?”

 

Not surprisingly, the bar is so devoid of customers on a Wednesday night that it’s like any other bar except the six people inside all happen to be gay. Nothing wild and brightly colored like Melissa had imagined. She shoulders her way through the door and peers into the dim room. A man in a bowtie and almost nothing else greets her from behind the bar with a wave. Scantily clad men lounge against tall tables— waiters with no one to wait on— chatting languidly, stretching incredibly toned muscles.

 _Inappropriate_ _,_ Melissa tells herself as she watches one man walk by. _They’re gay, and you’re old._

A waitress walks by with an empty tray and a leopard print bikini.

_Well._

“Can I help you with something, sweetheart?” Bowtie rubs down the tabletop with a luminescent smile. “I make a mean buttery nipple.”

“I’m looking— buttery nipple?” _I am way too old for this place_ _._ Melissa shakes her head. “I was told that my underaged son and his friend just walked into this place not too long ago. You wouldn’t happen to have seen him? About yeigh high? Mexican? His jaw’s a bit crooked?”

“You mean Scott?” Bowtie asks with a laugh. Melissa’s brow raises. “He’s in the corner booth over there, talking to the Boiz.”

“Talking to _who_ _?”_ Her head is spinning. How long has Scott been frequenting this gay bar that the bartender recognizes him by name? How long has he been coming to establish relationships with the people inside? (Though it soothes her heart a little bit to remember he has the sort of natural draw to intimate relationships that it could take him one day to warm up to another person.)

(Only a little bit.)

“The band. Just back there.”

Bowtie points, and Melissa obediently follows the direction. In the darkness, she manages not to stumble over the raised dance floor and navigate rather gracefully for a concerned mother in a foreign, dim room. She crosses her arms over her chest, mouth drawn and ready to shout when she sees a familiar face staring back at her.

“Caden?” she asks, squinting.

“Mrs. McCall!” His voice is lower than the last time she saw him, a fine stubble over his chin. On his side of the booth sits Emiko and another black boy who she assumes to be Caden’s younger brother. On the other side, Scott and Isaac, suddenly looking uncomfortable and out of place, craning their necks to look in any direction but Melissa’s. Caden gets to his feet and swallows Melissa into a hug. “It’s so good to see you! You look awesome.”

“Wh-what are you doing here?” she asks, a little frazzled but slightly returning the hug.

“We’re the Boiz. An homage to my plight,” Caden says, toothy grin, proud. “You remember Emiko? And that’s my little brother Vernon. We play here about twice a week? Not the best crowd on nights like this, but you’d be surprised how insane Thirsty Thursday gets around here.”

“I’m sure I would be,” Melissa says, not condescending but distracted. “Scott.” Scott squints at a suspicious spot on the ceiling. “Scott McCall. A word please?” Scott shimmies out of the booth, and Caden sniggers as he loops in beside Isaac, launching into a round of harmless questions that seems to overwhelm the boy.

Melissa pulls her son aside, arms crossed over her chest. “Do I even want to know?”

“Mom, I have a plan.”

“I would hope there would be a plan. It had better be a really freaking _good_ plan, Scott, to explain why you are in a _bar_ on a _school night_ when you are _underaged_.” There is a pointed raise to her brow that would make grown men quiver. Scott nervously rubs the back of his neck.

“Well, I was kind of winging it?” he admits. “But it’s working, Mom. Look!” He gestures back to the table where Caden, Boyd, and Emiko sit with Isaac. There is a low line of chatter running among them, smiles, even laughter that rises above the walls of the booth. Scott looks disappointed when there is no current of excitement bursting from his mother. “They’re _talking_ _._ Caden and Isaac. Boyd said he and Caden were doing a show here tonight, and I thought, well, who’s better to convince Isaac to live with us than someone who already has?! See, it’s perfect. ‘Cause Caden can tell Isaac how awesome and not-scary we are, and then Isaac can let us help him.”

“Honey, you can’t _trick_ him into trusting you!” Melissa pinches the bridge of her nose.

“I’m not tricking him, Mom! I said I have a friend I wanted him to meet. It’s not a lie! It’s not like I told Caden what to say or anything. He just told Isaac how cool you were without me even saying anything.”

Melissa almost hates the swell of pride in her chest. “He said I’m cool?”

“Who wouldn’t?”

Melissa knows Scott doesn’t give false compliments, so she merely places a gentle hand on his shoulder and offers a crooked smile. No matter how highly Scott thinks of her, their presence in a bar is inappropriate. She calls over Scott’s shoulder, “Isaac? Honey, we’re leaving! It was nice seeing you, Caden!”

 

Isaac sits in the backseat like he’s ready to escape. Melissa vaguely wonders if he’s even _sitting_ _,_ or if his body is just hovering a few inches above the seat, ready to pounce. He cracked the window while Melissa fiddled with her seatbelt, and Melissa pretended she didn’t hear the whooshing of the wind as she drove towards his home.

When she pulls into the drive, the front door of the house cracks open, and David Lahey’s shadow stretches across the lawn. He stands, immobile, a silhouette in the doorway. Isaac’s jaw sets, and his hand hovers over the handle on the door. Melissa takes his hesitation.

She turns around in her seat, slow. Isaac matches his gaze to hers, wide-eyed and skittish. “Isaac, if you want to stay with us tonight, we have room. You don’t have to go in there if you don’t want to.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know,” she says softly. Scott refuses to look back, doesn’t want to crowd him. “Do you have my number? In case you want to come over?” She offers her kindest smile. “Not to brag, but we’ve got a pretty great couch.” Isaac shakes his head, and Melissa starts to dig through her purse. “Let me write it down for you real quick then—” she starts, but before she can even find a pen, Isaac launches himself out of the car like a coiled spring being released. When she looks up, she sees David halfway across his yard, stalking in dark shadows towards the car.

There is a brief flinch as Isaac passes his father on the way to the house, but the two men keep their path. Melissa locks her doors.

“Scott, don’t say a word.” David taps on Melissa’s window, and she fits herself with a smile before she rolls it down. “Hey, David. Sorry I got him home so late. I—”

“I thought I told you to stay away from my kid.”

Melissa deflates. “Right.”

“You come near him again, I’ll call the cops,” David growls, though there’s a smile on his face that makes him more sinister. “Come near him again, and I’ll end you.”

“Hey, don’t talk to her like that!” Scott barks, and there is a line of tension running so taut through his body that Melissa believes, for the first time, that Scott’s bark is _not_ worse than his bite.

“Was I talking to you?” David snaps.

“Don’t talk to my kid like that!” Melissa snaps back. Their anger settles on the concrete between them. “We’re leaving. Now.”

“Yeah, you better.”

Melissa rolls up her window and backs out of the driveway, silent. Scott throws himself into his seat, fuming, arms crossed tight over his chest. They don’t speak for a long while, letting the hum of the car fill the air around them. She pulls into the driveway and lets the car idle, hands gripping the wheel, shoulders tense. Scott sits beside her, stony still, watching the dashboard with dull eyes.

“Mom?”

“Yeah, sweetie?” Resigned, tired.

“How can people just be so… _bad_ _?_ ”

Her heart hurts for him.

“I don’t know, honey. I really don’t know.” She takes her keys and shuffles out of the car. Scott hefts a backpack onto his shoulder, follows her silently up the porch steps as she fumbles for her house keys. “Scott? How did you even get to that bar?”

“Naomi drove us.”

“Naomi… Naomi Palermo?”

“Yeah.” Scott holds the door open wide while his mother gathers the mail stuck in the slot. “She told me to call her if I ever needed anything, and since I don’t have a car, we needed a ride.”

“So Naomi Palermo drove you to meet with Caden Boyd? And Bobby Parrish is sleeping in our guest room?” Melissa asks, a hint of laughter on her tongue. “Huh. Did you have coffee with Emily Kinney today too?”

“No, she doesn’t come in town ‘til Spring Break,” Scott says offhandedly, like it’s common knowledge.

“Oh, of course not. Any other boarders that you keep in touch with?” Melissa asks, brows raised, hands on her hips. She’s not angry. Quite contrary, her heart is glowing with pride of her son and of her boarders. She feels a sudden rush of affection for all of the victims who came through her home, who left as survivors, who left as friends. Still, Scott’s continued relationship with any of them is brand new news to her.

Scott shrugs his shoulders, missing her surprise as he toes boots off his feet. “Just a few of them send me emails every once and a while. Mrs. Taylor emailed me her recipe for the cornbread she sent us on Thanksgiving, ‘cause you said you liked it so much.”

“Did she now?” Melissa asks. She leans against the doorway as Scott starts up the stairs. “Oh, wait a second, mister. Don’t think you’re getting away with this.”

“Away with what?” Scott asks, surprised.

“You went to a _bar_. On a _school night_ _._ ” She pauses. “You’re _sixteen_ _._ ”

Scott groans.

  


Isaac doesn’t show up to school for the next two days, and Scott has a panic attack so intense that Stiles nearly has to shove his inhaler down his throat in the middle of the school parking lot. At the lacrosse game on Saturday, Scott and Stiles warm the bench beside Greenburg and an empty seat.

“Coach,” Scott asks, scrambling over Stiles’ lap. “Coach, where’s Isaac?”

“Lahey?” Finstock says, peering at the field. “He called in sick.”

“Coach, don’t you think it’s a little suspicious that he’s missed so many days of school this week?” Scott prods desperately. Stiles grabs him by the shoulder pads and tugs him back into a sitting position.

“McCall, I’m sorry I don’t have details on your boyfriend’s stomach flu. Now _let me watch the game_ _._ ”

Scott wants to ask more, but Stiles makes a comment about tackling him onto the field, so he holds it in.

  


Scott’s elbow deep in his punishment dishes when his phone starts to ring. He awkwardly dries his hands on his pants, and in his haste to catch the caller before the line died, he neglects to check the screen. “Hello?” he asks, pressing the phone to his shoulder.

“Scott.” Isaac's voice is hoarse, tired, terrified. Scott almost drops his phone into the sink. “Scott, I think I need your help.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: abuse, claustrophobia, blood, hospitalization, guns
> 
> AN: So this chapter is a little... jumpy? There are flashback scenes that were just too long to denote with italicized font. A few of scenes in this chapter happen simultaneously, but I hope I left enough clues within the text that you can follow along!
> 
> Also, as a general thing, I haven't taken Spanish in two years. I'm no where near fluent, and we all know that Google Translate is really not all that helpful. So if I butcher it when McCalls use it, I apologize.

Scott and Stiles sit in the ER waiting room. Scott’s knee bounces, a conduit of nervous energy, gripping his cell phone white-knuckled in his sweaty palm. Stiles alternates between intense though aimless pacing and shaking in the seat next to Scott. Every once and a while, a nurse bursts through the swinging doors, and Scott and Stiles shoot to their feet. No one addresses them, and they fall back, dejected, scared.

“Idiot,” Stiles mutters finally. “He’s such an idiot. I _told him_ …”

“He’s gonna be fine, Stiles,” Scott says. Every few minutes, he feels a hopeful, phantom buzz of his cell phone only to find that his desire to hear from his mother caused him to imagine her contact. “The EMT said that it was clean.”

“She also said he lost a lot of blood, Scott,” Stiles snaps, lashes out at the one being who he knows would never lash back. “She said my dad lost a _lot of blood_ _,_ and we both know that’s not _fine_.”

“Come on, your dad is tough,” Scott attempts through a dry mouth. He opens his phone again. No message. When he looks at Stiles, his eyes are wide.

“Then why is it _taking so long_?”

“Stiles, it’s been half an hour. It’ll be okay.”

“Would you be saying that if it was your _mom_ who had been shot?” Stiles barks, and he paces in tight circles, spinning so fast on his heel that Scott wonders if he’s worn a hole in the sole of his shoes. Scott allows Stiles to vent and steam, allows him to use Scott’s sturdy shoulders as a place to lay his baggage. Stiles is resilient and endeavoring, but he has no grace under pressure. (He has no grace to begin with.) It’s Scott who quietly compartmentalizes the bundle of stress he’s been handed, Scott who has always been able to look conflict and pain right in the eye and tell it that it wouldn’t win. He had broken in the past— he was a sixteen year old boy, and no one expected him to not have fissures in his being after the rocks that had been hurled at him— but he always came back up, cracked but smiling. Stiles’ rebound period was longer, and his fall was always deeper. Scott would take his pain because Stiles didn’t have to carry it alone.

Scott, unbeknownst to Stiles, had his own fears resting on his shoulders, thick under the layer that Stiles added.

 

\- - - - - -

When Scott hung up the phone, he went racing to his mother’s bedroom. She was on the phone with her mother, and when she saw the wild look in her son’s eyes, she clipped her sentence short and ended with, “ _Mamá, mi hijo me necesita._ ”

She slipped off her bed with gentle movements, like trying not to scare a frightened animal.

“Scott, honey, are you all right?”

“Mom, Isaac just called me. He needs our help.”

Melissa felt her heart still. “Did he tell you that?”  
“Yeah, Mom, he said that. He _said it_ , I _swear_.” In his rabid emotion, Scott couldn’t control his volume and ended up nearly shouting at his mother. She attempted to calm him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Okay. I’ll go get my keys. Go ask Bobby to change the sheets. Tell him he can take my room for the night, okay?”

Scott scrambled on weak knees about the house, and Melissa gained her composure before searching out her purse. They were both locked tightly into the car and well on their way to the address that Isaac had given them when Scott’s phone started buzzing again. In his haste, his trembling fingers nearly denied the call. He gulped into the speaker.

“Isaac, we’re on our way,” he promised.

“Scott, dude, it’s me. I… I…” Stiles’ voice was urgent but distant. Like he was speaking to someone in another room. His breathing was heavy and ragged. Scott felt the familiar sensation of his skin tightening with goosebumps, of the hair on the back of his arms rising. Panic attack. “My dad. Deputy Maori just… I… He… shot, Scott. My dad was… shot. I can’t breathe.”

Scott was suddenly hurtled between two different loyalties, and he fought a dry mouth and a frantic mind to choke out, “It’s okay, dude. I’ll be there as fast as possible. Keep breathing.” He pressed a hand over the speaker. “Mom, let me out of the car on Geyer Street. John was just shot, and Stiles needs me.”

Melissa nearly slammed on her brakes. “John was _shot_? Scott, is he _okay?_ ”

Scott could hear panting over the phone. “I don’t _know_ Mom, but you’ve _got_ to get Isaac, okay? I can handle Stiles. I’ll drive his Jeep to the hospital.” Melissa parked at the curb. “Just… just call me when you’ve got him, okay? Call me so I know that you’re okay.”

“I’ll be fine. Go.”

Scott, in the grips of loyalty, seemed to have lost all traces of asthma, of panic. He had never run so fast before in his life.

 

\- - - - - -

 

“Mr. Stilinski?” Melissa’s friend Patty walks into the waiting room with a clipboard. Scott and Stiles jump to their feet. “Your father is out of the OR. He was stitched up and stabilized. No complications, nothing. They’re getting him into a room now.”

Stiles is stock still, barely breathing. Scott sees a tremor run down the boy’s spine and answers for him, “Thanks, Patty. When can we go see him?”

“About twenty minutes, I’d guess,” she answers sweetly. “I’ll come back and get you the second the doctors are ready.”

After she disappears between the swinging doors, Stiles collapses into a chair with a heavy, relieved sigh, like he’s just pushed three tons of weight off his shoulders. All of the color in his body seems to have drained into the floor, and he sits limp, arms draped like fabric over the arms in the chair. Scott pats his shoulder in reassurance.

“Dude, I told you.”

Stiles waves him away with a weak hand. “I know. I know.”

A beat passes in which Stiles struggles to regulate his breathing. Scott nervously bites at his lip.

“I’m gonna make a phone call.”

Scott backs around the nurse’s station, keeping a trained eye on his friend while he waits for his mother’s voice on the other end. He calls the number three times before he switches to Bobby’s. No answer. No answer. No answer. Scott swallows his own anxiety before he returns to Stiles’ side. He fits himself with a smile that is just genuine enough that Stiles doesn’t even notice before Patty comes back and directs them to Sheriff Stilinski’s room.

Patty leaves them at the door, and Stiles stops Scott from entering the room. Scott knits his brow. Stiles nods his chin in the direction of the exit. “Go on. I can tell you’re nervous about something.”

Scott breathes a sigh of relief. “It’s my mom.”

“Was she shot too?” A joke, a bad one, but it still makes Scott laugh for a moment.

“I hope not. I’ll bring the Jeep right back, okay, man? I swear. Not even a scratch on it,” he promises.

“I’ll be here all night. Take your time.”

They both take a deep breath and separate.

\- - - - - -

Melissa made it to the rendezvous point and found it chokingly empty. It was an abandoned bus stop, the structure of a resting place where buses don’t even travel anymore. Melissa scrambled for her phone and remembered the hollowed fear in Scott’s eyes when he picked up Stiles’ call, so instead of pushing him further down a tunnel of terror, she dialed a different person.

“Bobby, it’s Melissa. Listen, do you think you can play deputy just a little bit early? I promise, the sheriff isn’t going to get mad at you.”

“And how can you promise that?” Bobby asked with a laugh, though she heard the clamor of his heavy boots dropping to the floor.

“Because he’s in the hospital with a bullet in his body.”

“ _What_?”

“I think he’s fine? I just… Bobby, I need your help,” Melissa begged. She peered out her car window into the dimming daylight and second-checked what she already knew: Isaac was not at the bus stop. He was not on the street corner. In all directions, the world around her was mysteriously vacant. She was alone, and so was Isaac, somewhere.

“What do you need?” Bobby asked, obedient, loyal.

“Grab my bat. I think we might need it.”

 

Bobby’s shitty car sputtered to a stop in the Lahey’s driveway just behind Melissa’s car. He killed the ignition and stepped out of the creaking vehicle, swinging the beloved bat lazily in his hand. “Is this the Lahey kid that Scott was telling me about?” he asked, holding out the makeshift weapon.

Melissa nodded, measured, jaw set. “He said he was going to meet me at the old bus stop at the corner of Butler Street, but he wasn’t there. I’m just worried that something bad might have happened to him,” she admitted, worrying her lip between her teeth. “I’m probably just being paranoid—”

“I’ve known you for a pretty long time, Melissa,” Bobby told her, knitting his fingers together over the hood of her car, squinting at the well-light house. “And I’ve never known your gut feeling to be wrong.”

Melissa wanted to reach up and smother him in a choking hug, wanted to kiss his cheek in thanks for reassuring her that she was not crazy, that she was not just desperate, that she was doing the right thing. Instead, she tightened her grip on her bat. “I actually kind of wish it was this time.”

They silently stormed the house, pausing on the front porch to knock heavily on front door. Before Bobby even had chance to use his deputy voice, the door swung open wide on its hinges, a creak into an otherwise silent house. Like out of a horror movie but this was real, and the monster wasn’t an axe-murderer but a father. Like out of a horror movie except but there was no turning off the television when the film got too gory.

“Mr. Lahey? This is the Beacon Hill’s Sheriff Department,” Bobby called into the depths of the home, only to have his voice thrown dully back to him. “My name is Deputy Parrish. We got a call about a domestic and needed to come investigate.” He and Melissa waited with bated breath. Nothing met them but their heavy breathing.

“Are you sure you haven’t been a deputy before?”

“I’ve been a big brother,” Bobby reminded her. “Makes you tougher than being a soldier.”

He stepped tentatively through the open door and called out one more time. Without an answer, Melissa followed. They treaded careful on creaking floorboards, and Melissa hesitantly called around each corner. “Isaac? Isaac, it’s Melissa McCall!”

They paused in the empty kitchen, took in a scene of scuff marks and flecks of scattered glass that were not swept away. There was a stain of fresh blood on the corner of the countertop, smudged and scrubbed diligently without avail. The faucet in the sink was dripping. Melissa sucked in the scent of disinfectant and nearly gagged as she let the breath go.

“Do you hear that?” Bobby asked, stockstill. Melissa listened. Bobby crunched over a stray shard of glass before pushing in the door in the back of the room. He stepped onto the landing of a set of concrete stairs, quiet. “Melissa, I think he’s down here,” he said urgently.

Isaac’s phone started to buzz on the counter.

\- - - - - -

Scott has called his mother’s phone nearly a dozen times in a row, and he’ll keep calling until she answers or his phone dies. He’s driving down the back roads of Beacon Hills without paying much attention to the roads themselves, and he nearly derails himself a number of times before he finally pulls the Jeep to the side and rolls down the window.

He takes in as much fresh air as his lungs can hold before steadying his shaking hands.

Leaving his mother to take Isaac from his insane and dangerous father was not Scott’s best idea, but Stiles needed him, and Scott’s life had always been leap-without-looking wherever Stiles was concerned. He didn’t want it to cost him Isaac’s trust, but he didn’t want Isaac’s trust to cost him Stiles’ friendship. (Sure, the latter was more secure than the former, but a distraught teenager could never make those rationalizations under pressure.)

Scott calls Melissa one more time, switches to Bobby for another six calls, and finally, with great trepidation, stamps out Isaac’s number. It rings, rings, rings, and switches to voicemail, and Scott gulps in the fresh, cold air before he can stammer into the speaker. There are million things that Scott wants to say: he wants to apologize for not being there, wants to say that he’s happy Isaac finally asked for help, wants to tell him just how fun being roommates is going to be. But the only thing that comes out of his lips is a strangled, “Is my mom okay?”

 

Muffled wailing alights Melissa, and she’s down the stairs before Bobby is, her bat raised high. She stops at the landing, twists her body around the concrete chamber. Bobby flicks on a switch at the bottom of the stairs, and two bare bulbs flicker to life, sending pools of dim light onto the cold, hard angles of the basement. The workbench is littered with dusty tools and half-open tool boxes. Storage bins stack tall along each of the gray walls. Underneath a small, high rectangular window where the dying light of day leaks barely into the room, there is a porcelain freezer chest that is rattling against the concrete.

The wails become a desperate hoarse cry, and the banging becomes rapid, fervent, arrhythmic. Melissa stumbles over, numb legs, and collapses on her knees in front of the freezer. She takes the thick padlock in her hands and tugs in vain. “Isaac! Isaac, sweetheart, it’s Melissa! I’m going to get you out, okay? Hold on!”

When she glances up to Bobby, she looks more desperate than she sounds. He thumbs through the tools on the workbench and comes up with a heavy set of hedge clippers. Kneeling at Melissa’s side, he holds his breath as he struggles to snap the metal lock. Isaac’s screams are growing more distraught, and the banging is nearly rocking the chest to its tipping point.

Finally, the padlock breaks open, and Bobby wrenches it out of the latch, tossing it aside with a clatter of metal on hard ground. Melissa throws open the lid of the chest, and instantly Isaac goes catatonic. His body seizes up, and only petrified whimpers break from his blue-tinted lips. There is a thick pool of dried blood on the side of his head that sticks to his neck and the collar of his shirt. Just below his left eye is the swell of a bruise, mottled hues of cool colors on his skin. Despite his desperate thrashing, his skin is cold to the touch, his muscles stiff.

“Come on, Bobby, help me get him out,” Melissa mutters.

Bobby slips an arm under Isaac’s shoulders, and with Melissa’s help drags the boy’s rigid body out. Melissa falls back, holding the boy to her chest, running a hand through blood-stained curls.

“Isaac, you’re safe. You’re safe. I’ve got you.” She ignores the churning illness in her stomach. Bobby scoots away and out of Isaac’s reach. It takes a minute or two of Melissa trying to rub warmth back into his numb appendages for Isaac to relax his muscles.

“M-Mrs. McCall?” he mumbles.

“Yeah, honey, it’s me.”

“Where’s Scott?”

“He’s at the hospital, which is where I’m bringing you right now. Bobby?”

Without much protest, Bobby and Melissa half-carry, half-support Isaac as he limps towards Melissa’s car. They lay him gently across the backseat, and Bobby takes off first, calling into the sheriff’s office to file a report while Melissa takes off at a speed that rivals Hurricane Andrew on crack.

Minutes after she zips away, David Lahey idles into the driveway. When he finds that his son is missing, he punches a dent into one of his toolboxes, slicing his knuckles. He is halfway up the stairs in a rage when he hears a tentative knock on the front door.

\- - - - - -

Without an answer from his mother, Scott drives the Jeep to the rendezvous point and to his own home, where he is both times dismayed to find that the family car is not. He calls Stiles as a habit of comfort, and Stiles listens with one ear while he watches his father sleeping in the hospital bed.

“Have you tried Lahey’s house? Maybe she went to go pick up his stuff or something.”

A beat.

“Stiles, you’re a genius,” Scott says.

“Yeah, I know,” Stiles replies. “If only my dad knew that, and then he’d start listening to me about retiring.”

When Scott hangs up, he’s halfway to the Lahey home. When he parks at the curb, he finds that the car is not in the driveway. Inexplicably, he decides to walk up to the house. He knocks carefully on the front door, noting drips of blood on the wooden boards of the porch at his feet. Slowly, he starts backing up.

The door flings open, and David Lahey barrels out of his home. He grabs Scott by the throat and hurls him into the porch post, squeezing hard around his windpipe. “Where the _hell_ is my son?”


	14. Chapter 14

When she sits next in the chair next to John’s bed, he’s bleary-eyed—a little drugged, a lot tired, but alive. She passed Stiles in the hallway where his audibly grumbling stomach signaled a trip to the vending machine, and when she throws herself down, she doesn’t hide the breath of relief she hasn’t been able to release in hours.

“How ya feelin’, champ?” she asks with a crooked smile. She slouches, lets go of the tension that has built in her neck, lays limp as a spaghetti noodle in her chair. Her shoulders ache from hauling Isaac to-and-from the car. “Bet my day was worse than yours,” she jokes.

John chuckles, genuine, and it turns into a throaty cough. “At least I get drugs.”

“Do you know what happened?” she asks, gentle.

John shifts in his pillows. “I pulled a kid over for speeding. I guess he had a few too many strikes on his record or something, and he pulled a gun. Don’t remember much after that. Luckily my back-up car was en route otherwise I’d probably still be on the side of Monroe Avenue right now.”

The state requires two police cars to be present when offenders are pulled over for precisely this reason, but John trusts the people of Beacon Hills— even though history has shown that he shouldn’t— and he rarely follows the protocol exactly the way it is written. Rules are for enforcing, he believes, not for following.

“Did they catch him?” Melissa asks.

“No idea,” he says. “Maori came by when I was still knocked out. Wouldn’t tell Stiles anything because of all the red tape. You know how it goes.” Melissa nods. She does. “For his sake, I hope he _is_ caught because if I’m the one who goes out and finds him, the punk’s dead meat.”

Melissa softens. “Yeah, I’d wait for those drugs to wear off before you go making any promises like that, tough guy.”

The silences in hospitals are never real silences, even where the dead sleep. There’s always some machine beeping, some nurse chattering. The clatter of gurneys and dings of elevators. It’s not too disruptive, almost like white noise to a trained nurse like Melissa, and now she is thankful for it, for the heart monitors and the whirring of the air conditioning making the hallways cold and sterile. She does not need to lapse into total silence with nothing but her thoughts. Not today.

“You didn’t have to come visit me on your day off,” John finally tells her. “I’ll still be here tomorrow.”

“No offense, John, but I’m not here for you,” she says, tired laughter biting at the edge of her voice. She sits up straight, leans elbows over her knees. John watches with a furrowed brow.

“Is Scott all right?”

“Yeah,” Melissa answers, though she’s not entirely sure. “It’s… It’s Isaac Lahey.” She buries her face in her hands, trying to wipe away the mental scarring of her afternoon. Digging young boys out of freezer chests, scrubbing blood from her hands. “I’ve seen a lot of pretty horrible things with the people I bring into my house,” she admits, “but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“Start from the beginning,” John suggests after a moment of hospital-white-noise.

She’s not sure where the beginning is, if it’s with Irina or Claudia’s death or Rafael’s leaving. She isn’t sure what story she needs to tell, but John’s willing to listen, and it’s not like he’s going anywhere, so she just starts and doesn’t know where she’s going to go.

 

Isaac only lets people touch him because he’s in too much pain to move. It’s a culmination of repeated beatings and banging desperately around a ceramic prison. Shock drowns the headache and strangles the sting from the gashes on his knuckles and the tears in his fingernails, but there is the dull ache that reaches deeper than his bones, that curls around the muscle of his heart and clings. That’s been there longer than Isaac can remember. It’s like a friend he’s known too long that he’s afraid to shake. He’s not sure where he would be without it.

There’s bandages and stitches and flashlights in his eyes. He’s corralled from room to room on a wheelchair with a squeaky wheel. There’s an IV in his arm, a bizarre rush of lukewarm fluids being pumped into his veins. He’s so desperately tired that he falls asleep during his series of x-rays. They wake him back up.

“—concussion,” he hears them say but cannot connect it with the rest of their words. “No sleeping.”

It hurts a lot to clamber into one of the beds, and the nurses clutch too firmly to secure him. The woman who sits at his bedside to keep him awake is kind, but he doesn’t much feel like talking. His answers are less than monosyllabic, just grunts and sounds of recognition. His arm is pinned to his chest, and there’s a contraption wrapped snugly around his ankle. Each time he yawns, the nurse makes him sit up straight. It hurts.

It’s dark outside his window when a familiar face fills his doorway. Isaac’s spine stiffens.

“Hey, Isaac. It’s Bobby Parrish. I’m the one who came over with Melissa,” he says, careful and measured. He creates no distance and closes no space between them, hovering in the doorway like an intruder and a guardian both. “I have a friend out here who wants to ask you a few questions. Is it okay if she comes in?”

Isaac is surprised by the gravelly sound of his voice when he says, “That’s fine.”

A short woman with a dark sheet of red hair and a wrinkled deputy uniform squeezes past Bobby, pen and notepad in hand. Isaac shimmies up straight, biting back his pain with a grunt. She stands a few feet from the bed, casts a look over her shoulder to her fellow deputy. Bobby’s nod is slight, but he melts from the doorway. Isaac sees his shadow through the glass beside the door.

“I change my mind,” Isaac bursts suddenly, in a panic. “I change my mind. I don’t want you in here.”

The woman hesitates. “Okay. I don’t have to be. I can come back later when you’re ready.”

“I want to call my dad. I want…” His throat is dry, his eyes darting around the room like he’s a trapped animal. “Can I call him?”

She bites her lip and without a word, crosses the room and sticks her head out the door. Isaac can barely hear her over the rush of blood in his ears, and Bobby Parrish squeezes into the space the woman left behind. Isaac fingers the IV drip in his arm, clenching it, ready to tug it straight out if he needs to.

“Are you okay?”

“I want to talk to my dad,” Isaac says. He sounds like a distressed child, tears biting at the back of his throat. He will not look Bobby in the eyes, but Bobby knows they’re wet and confused and scared. For once, he’s glad he’s the one here, the one who has to address this boy who has been through so much. It isn’t that police don’t have right intentions, but they’re rarely fit to deal with victims of abuse from a lack of common understanding. Bobby knows the paradoxical feeling of being afraid and wanting the person who terrified you. He knows that fear and desire can exist on one playing field, and he knows that somewhere in the back of your mind, even a parent like David Lahey isn’t _simply_ a monster.

“Sure, we can call your dad,” Bobby promises. He crosses his arms over his chest, not defensive, but to show Isaac he won’t use them. “Can I sit down?” he asks, nodding towards the chair beside the boy’s bed. Isaac’s nod is nearly imperceptible, and Bobby sits. “We just want you to be safe, and so we would like to talk to you before we bring your dad here. But it’s illegal for us to do that without your permission.”

“I just want to talk to him first,” Isaac pleads.

“I know you do,” Bobby says, “but I think it would be best if he wasn’t here. But again, Isaac, we can’t talk to you without your permission.” Isaac looks up, shaking. “We just want what’s best for you. That’s all.”

“Who’s _we_?” Isaac asks, somewhat vitriolic, though there is no power behind his voice.

“Me. Melissa. Scott.” Bobby’s lip quirk. “There’s a lot of people who care about you. And we don’t think you’re safe when your dad is around.”

“O-okay,” Isaac finally says. “Okay, I’ll… I’ll answer your questions. And then can I call my dad?”

Bobby offers a sad smile. “Sure you can.”

 

Scott scrambles, blunt nails on blue-veined skin. He’s choking, gasping, refusing words in defiance and because of the physical improbability. The edges of his vision blur and darken. David Lahey’s words reach his ears as ringing echoes, incoherent and unimportant. But Scott’s brow furrows, eyes screwing up in pain, and he manages to wheeze, “I’ll never tell you where he is.”

Never mind that he doesn’t even know.

David releases his throat with air hissing through clenched teeth. He braces his hands on either side of his head, flat against his temples, fingers entangling in his thin hair. Scott collapses and catches himself on the railing of the porch, one hand rubbing at the steadily bruising sink around his neck. David looks deranged.

“What did you do with him?” he growls, reeling in sloppy circle around the warped floorboards. “What did you _do_? You can’t take my son away from me. You can’t…” His words die into a static muttering, and Scott watches in horror as the man seems to unhinge in front of his eyes. He wheels Scott with such vehemence that he finds his knees buckling in immediate fear. “ _He’s all I have! You can’t take my son away from me!_ ”

“You don’t have the right to have a son if all you do is beat on him!” Scott, in his meager sixteen years, is no verbal magician, but he tries to conjure up the speech that he had heard Melissa give survivors far too many times. He straightens with great difficulty, coughs hard. His eyes water with pain. “He deserves better than that, and you’re… you need _help_ , or you need to stay the hell out of Isaac’s life.”

There is a busy silence in which David stares across the porch at the teenager with the gaze of a wounded animal. Scott stares back, a deer in headlights, muscles coiled and ready to dart away at the slightest movement. So when David’s expression melts into one of unadulterated fury, he is already jumping the steps and racing out to the Jeep.

He wastes no time fumbling with a seatbelt. The door is barely closed when he charges down the street at highly illegal speeds. In the rearview, David is collapsed on his knees in the front yard, his head in his hands.

  
  


When Stiles sticks his head in the door of his father’s room, the man is stubbornly trying to open a pudding cup with one hand, and Melissa is asleep in the chair beside his bed. “Hey, Stiles,” John says, not picking up his head. “How’s the cafeteria meatloaf? Any better than last time?”

“No time to talk, Dad,” Stiles says urgently. He squats in front of Melissa and gives her shoulders a rough shake. “ _Melissa_!” he coos.

“Stiles, knock it off!” John reprimands.

Melissa jolts awake in his grip and groggily glances around the room. “What? What… I… I drifted off. I’m sorry.”

“Melissa, they need you in the ICU,” Stiles tells her.

“Who’s they?” Melissa asks, getting to her feet.

“I don’t know. I thought you would know.”

She darts out of the room and starts for the ICU. At the doors, one of the nurses gives a relieved smile. “We couldn’t find you!” she exclaims.

The police officer at her side asks, “Melissa McCall? You’re the one who brought Isaac Lahey in?”

“Yeah, that was me,” Melissa admits. “How’s he doing?”

“We’re trying to keep him conscious for right now because we’re scared for a concussion,” the nurse answers. She holds her clipboard close to her chest, shivers. “He was throwing up when we got him in here, but we can’t tell if that was panic or…” Her voice fades. “Anyway, he’s stable. We’ve got some fluids in him. We can’t administer pain medication unless we have his insurance information, but he’s being a real trooper about it. Hasn’t complained once.”

“So what do you need me for?” Melissa asks, an ache in her heart, imagining a teenaged boy in that much pain waiting for relief and not getting it.

“He’s agreed to talk to us without his father present,” the police officer fills in. “But he said he wants you there.”

“Me?”

“Looks like it.”

In the silence that follows, a million thoughts flutter through her mind. She takes a deep breath, nods, stuffs her hands in her pockets nervously. “I can do that. Yeah.”

Isaac looks small in his hospital bed. Feather light, like he barely makes a dent in his pillow. There’s a tick in his jaw as he clenches in tight, rings under his eyes of bruises and exhaustion. He’s stitched up, wrapped in plaster, rubbed raw and red. He’s tired. She can see it in his expression. He manages to channel all his fear into his twitching fingers that tap a beat against elbow; with his arm strapped across his chest, he has little room for mobility. He looks trapped.

“Hey, Isaac,” Melissa says softly. Bobby rises from his seat. “How’re you doing?”

Isaac sets her with a blue-eyed stares, swallows in reply. Bobby clears his throat and offers, “He said he wants this over with as soon as possible, and we’ve only got so much time before we’re required to let his father know he’s here.” He scoots aside, offers his seat to Melissa. “So let’s get started. I’ll ask Officer Greenburg to come back—”

“No, I want you to do it,” Isaac says hoarsely. “I don’t… I don’t want to talk to her.”

Bobby hesitates, shares a glance with Melissa. “Isaac, I’m not officially a deputy yet, so whatever you tell me can’t really be used to help you.”

Isaac’s eyes start darting around the room, a flight response to his panic, and he searches for a way out of the situation that seems to be smothering him. As he loses control of the situation, he starts to lose control of himself. The trembling that wiggled through his fingers spreads to his limbs. The heart monitor by his bed picks up, a fast rhythm of anxiety.

“What if,” Melissa suggests carefully, “What if Officer Greenburg stands in the doorway and listens, but she won’t say anything? Is that okay? You don’t even have to look at her.”

Isaac contemplates and offers a half-nod, unsure but willing to concede to Melissa’s compromise. Bobby goes to the hall to prepare the officer for the change in plans, and Melissa reaches out, taking the boy’s hand tentatively in her own.

“Isaac, you don’t have to do anything you aren’t comfortable with,” she reminds him. “If you don’t want to do this, just say so, and it’s done. No one is here to upset you. We just want to help.”

His reply is little other than the shaking of his limbs, but his heart starts to slow.

“Okay, Isaac, are you ready?” Bobby asks, careful but hopeful, bright.

Isaac nods.

“Okay, we’ll start really easy, okay?”

Where Melissa thinks Isaac would want to pull away, he holds her hand desperately tighter and answers every question as if he’s talking to her. 


End file.
